Reclaiming Our Land

Let's review where we're at with our backyard ivy project. I'm just a little late getting around to posting everything because once the mosquitoes came out in full force, we haven't touched the yard at all. So we stopped work by early June and the latest picture below is from late June, once we got the grass to come up. But it's still impressive, even if a tad delayed.

First, a refresher on last fall:

By October, we had ripped out about 50 square feet of ivy and managed to get grass to grow in its place:

The leafy trees in the foreground are lilac bushes that were really languishing from lack of sunlight and invasive ivy. Since they weren't happy there and I wasn't happy having them there (they were right in the middle of the area I wanted to clear and open up), it was time for them to go.

Here's a better picture so you can see them (you can see that these pictures are all from very different seasons by the flowering tree on the right, which is totally bare in the pictures above--it's in the top left--and full and leafy down below):

My parents and D got the lilacs moved to the front while I cleared a giant swathe of ivy from where they used to be. Then it was time to plant grass seed. Meanwhile I kept working at the ivy--you can see below that we got some new grass but there are still some bare patches where I continued to push the ivy back.

Here's the final picture for the year: no lilac bushes, no bare patches, lots and lots of grass where the ivy used to be. Of course the rest of the yard is a mess and we still have a lot of work, but I'm proud of our reclaimed land--probably about 200 square feet that we didn't used to have!

There is still a little ivy under the tree but that will be easy to remove come fall. And all without weed killer!