SNOWmagedon 2011

THIS WAS THE BIG ONE, I am sure of it. The biggest snow that the Midwest has seen for awhile, and I have a feeling it will hit the record books for sure. It may never happen like this again for a LONG LONG time so I want to document it here. I wasn't originally NOT going to include winter stuff here, but this was such a monster storm it needs to go down in the books, or at least in my books.

IT STARTED LIKE THIS...

Okay this was just a wow! This is our garage's back door. We opened it up to get a peak at what was really out there. Having a great big yard can be really fun and rewarding, but someone has to clean it up when it snows and that someone is Kelly, lol.  Let's get out there and see how really bad it is? UM WHAAAAT :) Kelly is over 6 feet tall, and the snow is over his knees! BUT oddly enough, look under that tree to the left, GROUND??? Weird. It's all about the snow drifts here. We had drifts in NY too, but not like this. We had areas of our year from this storm that where up to Kelly's chest area! 

I didn't feel too bad for him because he was dying to jump on his 4 wheeler and start pushing snow. He cleaned up our garage landing area, but that was about it, we needed a front loader to clear the rest of our drive which was just downright CRAZY!!!

It looks like ice-cream oh so YUMMY! I love taking pictures of the snow 'untouched'. The house was basically buried. I wonder if we ever get a snow like this again?

The pond is under there somewhere. Where did it go?  Below, the kitty cats got their own private pathway cut for them. My Cats love being out in the snow, or at least Salem doesn't mind too much. She let's me know when she is ready to come in and warm up near the fire. 

LET ME IN you crazy people. don't you know it's cold out here! This is our princess Salem :)

Stay tuned. As soon as all this none sense melts, Kelly and I will be prepping for the 2012 planting season. We still have a ton of projects left to get the outdoor living space up to par. 

Halloween - What happened to Summer?

Well here I am at the end of 2010 and as you can see I posted no garden pictures for the Summer of 2010. I dug deep in the vault of pictures and NOTHING. Well, no need to throw in the towel yet. I have some really wonderful outside shots for this month (October). Kelly and I go all out decorating our yard for Halloween so I'm adding those pictures here since the heavily feature the yard. 

I have a few weeds now lingering in the Front Window Garden area, but it adds to the creepiness of Halloween, and that is the excuse I'm going with :)  If you look closely to the right you can see the pine tree totally browning up. This is not supposed to be happening, especially in October. The pine trees at the front windows definitely have something going on with them. It's a good reason to pull them up. 

Check out our AWESOME green pond, lol. Also not done on purpose for Halloween, just a crazy spurt of algae growing. I actually added a bail of Barley? Hay? ummm yeah, one of those and it cleared right up. Learning curve here, learning curve. Also, my cat Pookie made an appearance :) She is cute! This is her first year in this house. I had her shipped over from NY hahaha.

I added this picture because in the back you can see the new bed Kelly put in. I love it and it will make a great addition for the 2011 planting season. I can't make promises that I will have pictures and proof of that growing season, but I sure will try.  The next few pictures are added just for kicks. Grown adults dressed up for Halloween that have no kids!! What is wrong with these people, lol? 

Gotta love this. Kelly loved dressing up as DRACULA, what a hoot. Blood anyone? Maybe a dead one tree?

Stay tuned for updates. Hope to get more pictures up soon...

Stormy Weather and Sanford and Son...What?

Today we had a pretty strong storm rip threw here. It was not a Tornado, but it packed some serious high winds. Several branches in the back yard came down so Kelly took advantage of it and did some additional trimming as well.  We also had a eye sore spot where we had piled some junk in the back yard and it was time to get it cleaned up.  As you can see I have containers and birdhouses just piled around :( - Not a good thing.

In the picture above you can see the old bird bath just filled with ORANGE water? That bird bath is going to turn into something pretty soon! It is actually a broken fountain, but Kelly has a wonderful idea about bringing it up front and planting in it. I think we are going to go with it. 

On to the other cleaning we did that day, below. Check out this mess. I am almost too embarrassed to post this here, but it does get cleaned up and needs to be shown. I hear the Sanford and Son music playing in the background when I look at this mess, lo. Maybe it will shame me enough never to do this again!! It was beginning to look like a junk yard - GAHHH.

LET THE CLEAN UP BEGIN...

So much better, ahhhhhh. This needed to be done so badly. Now this area is not done and there is still a lot more that needs to be done here, but this is a great start! 

Can't ask for more than this! Now at least Sanford and Son won't be moving into my backyard any time soon.

What, you have a pond now?

All I can say looking back now is, "darn it"!!! For this year we did a raised garden bed and a pond, and all my pictures of these processes apparently went to the birds, because I can't find them. I'm too sad to think about it, but what I can do is post some pictures of the new items and just hope one day those original pictures magical show up. It was a lot of work for Kelly to dig this pond out, and it saddens me to think the pictures of the process are lost.

Here is the completed pond. We never had one, so this too is a learning thing for us too. We kind of just went with it, hahaha. I think it looks pretty good and Kelly loves it so that is all that matters! I love this statue that sits by the pond, slightly creepy, but cute lol.

Please do not judge me on this part. This is a FAKE lily pad. Yes, you heard me right ...FAKE. I have always wanted real lily pads, so I will have to see what I can do about that. I need to do some reading to even see if this type of plant is growable in such a small pond as this one. I didn't want anything too big, just a water source for the birds. Future research will be needed to determine if this FAKE plant stays or not, lol.  I can say one thing though, my photography skills are starting to improve greatly.

Spring of 2010 is just around the corner. I do not have any plants up yet for this year, so we are cleaning up from the yucky winter and getting ready. Kelly also added this awesome new planting area near my walk way.  I am not sure what I will put there yet, but something fun will be headed to that spot soon.

Kelly worked extremely hard today, but one thing I can say is I am really starting to love doing outside work. It is so nice to finally have a real yard.  Kelly is cleaning up some stray gravel from out drive. It's not in the best shape, and one day we hope to have it redone.

Finally Container pics :)

I finally was able to get pics of my containers :) I used my Cricut to label all my containers.

I didn't label the above container yet - It was forgotten actually (ooops), but this is my Arugula lettuce leaves with Spinach planted around.

Hard to see in the pictures above but I have wire trellis posts behind them so I have a place to support the tomatoes and peppers as they grow :)

The Radish plants were def an experiment lol. I have no idea what will happen here but I was willing to try. Yesterday I thinned them down to two inches apart as required and we will just have to wait and see. If I get just one I would feel excited and like it was an accomplishment lol :)

The dirt in the Mixed Salad container looks a lil funky but the new seeds are still pushing it all up. I'm going to give it a few more days, and then tap down the soil better to get this one looking more normal lol :) Woooohooo my First Container Garden, never planted anything before. I figured I would just plant everything and whatever survives will be eaten! lol :)

EDIT: I used vinyl for making these letters. This is actually repositionable vinyl. I found it at Lowe's. It's is actually wall border that has sticky on one side and Vinyl on another. I just run it threw the Cricut and cut away, and then used transfer tape to get it mounted straight on whatever surface I want. Lowe's no longer carries this wallpaper so I stocked up when they had 16 feet rolls for a dollar a piece. I got tons of colors. I have watered the plants and wet the surface and so far they have not peeled off. I will have to check them again tonight as I am not positive this will last the summer lol.

Some Before and Afters

As promised here are some of the before and after pictures of the changes that have been made up to this point to the front of the house. The previous owner not only did not maintain what he planted around the houses perimeter, but he also planted incorrect shrubs that are way overgrown for the areas.

FRONT OF HOUSE BEFORE

FRONT OF HOUSE AFTER

KITCHEN WINDOW AREA BEFORE

KITCHEN WINDOW AFTER

BEDROOM WINDOW AREA BEFORE

BEDROOM WINDOW AREA AFTER

The changes are pretty fabulous and I love them. Everything looks so clean and orderly now. There is still a lot more to be done to these areas, but it feels good to get things started!

Before Pictures - What needs to change!

Here are the changes we have made so far.  The pictures below just show arrows on all the shrubs and weeds that we removed. 

We both want to clean this all up and make it pretty :) Check back soon for some more pictures of the progress to these specific areas :)