A little more lawn

Since we bought this place two and a half years ago, we've been slowly conquering some of our back yard from the ivy and ground cover gone wild. Especially now that the front yard looks halfway decent, we thought we should spend a little more time in the back.

Yesterday we took advantage of a beautiful day (and rain in the forecast) to clear away this mess from near our patio and plant some grass seed.

 Isn't it nasty? I'm not sure you can tell from this picture but some of the weeds were almost 4 feet high (and that after mowing it a couple times last fall).

With our feline overlord watching from the house (and meowing his displeasure occasionally), we got to work.

Fortunately nothing will ever seem quite so hard as liriope or English ivy and since this had none of the former and only a little of the latter, we made quick progress. Here's where we were after a little under two hours. Even though we don't like the stuff around the trees (mostly Japanese spurge with some ivy thrown in), we don't know what we eventually want to use as ground cover. So for now we kept a small ring of it around the tree to deal with later.

Fast forward another hour or so and we had the soil tilled and mixed with compost and grass seed down (and covered and watered).

Here's an overhead shot--it already looks so much better and the grass isn't even growing yet. I don't know why we didn't clear this area out sooner.

Of course nothing comes without a price. Apparently despite gardening gloves and generally good practices, D woke up to discover mild painful and itchy poison ivy this morning on his arms and legs. Thank goodness for Tecnu!