Cleaning Up Our New Home Garden

We recently moved into a beautiful old house in the downtown neighborhood of our city. The house is everything we were looking for, but it was built in 1905 so it has its share of problems. The windows are drafty and the floor is slanted in parts of the home, but probably the biggest place that needed improvement was the yard.

The previous tenants had done a lot of haphazard work on the yard and had not kept up any of it. When they moved out they left us with an unfinished porch, tree branches down all over the yard, and several gardening projects halfway done. The front yard was just as bad, overrun with weeds. To get started on this huge project, we first began by clearing as much of the debris from the yard as possible. We took a hand saw to the largest tree branches, and broke up the ones we could manage by hand. We put them in a pile in the far corner of the yard to use as firewood. Next, we had to take care of the weeds. We pulled the bigger ones by hand, took a weed whacker to some of the harder to reach areas, and just mowed the rest down with the lawnmower. This took care of most of the weeds, but I would not recommend using a lawn mower if you can help it because it's bad for the machine and spits weeds out at random. After everything was cleared away, we started cleaning up the fixtures in the yard. We gave the peeling deck a fresh coat of paint, and nailed some straying boards back in place.

We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but giving ourselves a fresh slate to work with will make the process easier. Disposing of all the yard trash has also proven to be a hassle, so we're trying to do controlled burns with as much as we can.

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