Spring = Time for Yardwork

I love spring. The weather is starting to warm up, things are growing, I start to get a little color in my skin and the world looks new... but there is this thing about owning a house...called spring yard work. Not so fun.  Luckily, I also have this wonderful thing called a husband (LOTS of fun) and he's taking the lead on the spring yard work. (And by lead I mean he's doing all of it...not me - I know, I'm a lucky girl.)

Our biggest issue is our grass, or lack thereof. The combination of a really shady front yard (grass likes sunlight) and all the house work we've been doing (trampling the grass doesn't help anything) has wreaked havoc on our yard. Dragging loads of trash out to the front of our yard didn't do a lot of good for our grass. And the crews we had working on things like our foundation and roof didn't exactly pay the strictest attention to our plant life. But we're determined to at least get a little plant growth, even if neither of us was born with a green thumb.

We (yes, by 'we' I really mean LJ) started out by using weed & feed on both the back and front yard. Weed and feed kills off the weeds while encouraging grass to grow. I wasn't sure how well it would work, but we gave it a try. As you can see, we paid about $30 a bag.

We ended up only needing one bag (but now we have another stored for future use). To use this stuff you have to have one of those nifty little wheelbarrow looking spreaders. Luckily, we were able to borrow one from family instead of having to make a purchase. 
I remember wanting to play with my dad's spreader when I was little. It just looked like fun. As an adult... not quite the same level of enthusiasm. But it is better than spreading the stuff by hand (like the cartoon Johnny Appleseed).

Just fill her up and start walking!

After you weed and feed you need to thoroughly water the grass to get it in the ground, or the nitrogen will burn your grass.  It rained pretty hard the day we spread it out, so that was sufficient.

Something we also purchased was a lawnmower. How did we go this long without one? When we first moved in we hired a law service. They did a great job...until they stopped coming for no apparent reason (do we smell?). Rather than find another lawn crew we decided to break down and do the work ourselves. Our lawn isn't really that big. So, last weekend we purchased a Craftsman Lawnmower. Ticket price was about $250, it was on sale for $200 and Sears was having a 'tax free' deal where they paid tax on big purchases. So, I think we ended up with a pretty good deal. Of course, the box was too big to fit in LJ's car, so we ended up having to take the pieces out and drive home with it all loose. Note for future lawnmower purchase: bring an SUV or Van.

Here it is disassembled (it really didn't have that many pieces):

And after reading the instructions and putting it together:

I have to tell you, the hardest part was getting the bag onto that red wire frame. If you ever have to do this I suggest you use a flat head screwdriver to help you pry open the rubber tube that the frame fits in. This probably doesn't make sense now (sorry, didn't think to take a picture), but it will make sense when you're sitting there trying to assemble everything. LJ mowed the yard a few days after he used the weed and feed (don't want to suck up what we just spent time laying down).

So, the yard was mowed, fed and that left the third step: watering it. We don't have a sprinkler system and have no desire to spend the money installing one right now. Instead, we bought these timers to hook up to our hoses and sprinklers. They allow us to determine the time and duration of our watering. Ours are set for 5AM so that the water has some time to sink into the ground before the hot sun comes out and tries to steal it all away.

This is what they look like. We purchased 2 of them from Lowe's, each was about $25.

Like I said before, this all occurred last weekend. So, what is the result? Well, our grass definitely has grown more, and the weeds have definitely died off. I honestly am surprised at how well the weed and feed worked. But here's the problem... by killing off the weeds we've learned exactly how much of our back yard was weeds, not grass. Seriously, there are huge brown patches of dead weeds everywhere.

See what I mean? At first I thought the weed and feed just killed off everything, grass included. But I've looked closely and the dead stuff really does look different than the grass. It's definitely weeds.

So where do we go from here? Eventually we're going to have to lay down some sod. But for right now our focus is the interior of our home so we'll just keep feeding/watering the grass and hoping it can gain some ground (literally). It's like watching an epic battle of good and evil in slow motion. Go grass go!