Yard updates

We've been too busy enjoying the nice weather to do much around the house lately, but we have done some lawn and garden maintenance. I had a nice picture of 6 or 7 big containers filled with lawn waste and leaves, but I seem to have misplaced it. You can use your imagination.

This year we had some help over-seeding the backyard and picking up leaves and sticks:

The big change this year was removing most of the lilacs from the front garden. After 3 years, most of them never really took off.  So we got rid of them like we said we would. We kept the one closest to the front door and the new ones

In their place, we put two Knock-Out roses. If they grow happily, they'll become 3-4 feet high dense shrubs that bloom repeatedly late-spring through early fall. It probably won't happen, but I continue to be optimistic.

The vast, cleared area from last fall is looking good, though the grass is a little spotty where we didn't manage to clear away the wet leaves. We tried over-seeding but not much is happening yet. It's still a huge improvement - so much space now!

After spending a whole nap (I measure my time in toddler naps now) weeding a few weeks ago, I'm sorry to see that the dandelions and other weeds have proliferated, so I guess I know what I'm doing this weekend as well. I tried using weed inhibitors, but they don't seem to have done much. Well at least a lot of the plants have come back after a particularly harsh winter, so that's exciting.

Finally, we're being proactive and spraying our new hawthorn with fungicide weekly this year after it was infected with rust last summer. Hopefully this does the trick! We picked hawthorn of all trees because it is supposed to be foolproof, so I don't know what that says about us....