The making of a yard (another part of many!)

Our lofty leaf collection

On Saturday, after finishing my last blog post, I zipped outside to tidy up the yard while Jay was at a Salmon Watch training (how could I pass that up for my Saturday morning, you ask.  It was pretty easy....)  I raked up what leaves we had - for the time of year things are looking pretty good.

I ran into (literally) this creepy spider web while raking.  It's the perfect spooky web for Halloween and I couldn't bring myself to knock it down.  That, and I was afraid of it...

At 5 pm that afternoon we had 20
yards of eco-bark (that's ecoNOMY/budget friendly....not ecoLOGICALLY friendly) delivered to our driveway.  The delivery man tried to tell us we would need machinery to move our bark mulch pile...so we showed him our big guns!! (Oh no she didn't!!)

So we suited up and got to work!  Shovel into pile, dump into wheelbarrow or garden cart, drag said barrow/cart to staked off portion of yard, dump, return, repeat.  And on we went for a good 90 minutes. The sunset made us quit for the night, but we were back at it Sunday morning.  By 2 pm all of the areas had been covered and the bark spread.  It was looking amazing!
We then organized the garbage/recycling/ trash bins behind the fence and out of sight.


Our next project was to plan out our back and front yard path, to be filled in on Monday.  Once we felt comfortable with that, we moved on to cleaning up the porch area.

Our little bench, happily nestled in the new bark

Shep needed a nap after all of OUR hard work!

For the path we decided on wood chips and Monday morning Jay got to work laying down weed barrier along our staked pathway.  We chose to add stepping stones leading to the front door and opted for another wallet-friendly choice, I believe Home Depot calls them "16" squares of boring heaviness" and they look great!!  In the afternoon we had 4 yards of wood chips delivered and when I got home from work I helped finish hand spreading the chips around the house.  What a difference mixed wood products make!

Front pathway, pre-wood chip

Post wood chip! So inviting!  Let's go to the right....

...and we return to the front!

..and around the back...