lawn care: getting started

Hello all!  Hope your Monday is starting out well.  We had a jam packed weekend.  Lots of time outside, a get together with some friends and bread baking!

My first loaf on Saturday to share with friends.

And then a small loaf for us last night.  5 minute bread is my favorite!

Before I get into the topic for today, I want to announce the winners to the final Chobani + Champs giveaway.

Case of Chobani 6oz cups

Case of Chobani Bites

Case of Chobani Champions cups

Case of Chobani Champions Tubes

Congratulations all!  Send me an email (heather.englund@comcast.net) with your address and I’ll forward it on to get your prizes sent out to you.  Thank you all for entering and participating in my week of birthday giveaways!

If there is one thing I am not an expert on, it’s lawn care.  Or plant care.  Or gardening.  Or controlling the ever growing and exploding black berry vines.  So pretty much anything outside. That’s why professionals like the retaining wall contractor in Downers are an essential.

In the 5 years Jacob and I have owned our house, we have neglected our yard.  It was actually really nice when we first moved in, and then it all went down hill from there.  In the past we have tried to keep up with it, but since we never got to the maintenance stage, the crazy amount of up front work always got the best of us and we gave up.

But things have changed now.  We have a little man that’s going to love running and rolling around in nice grass.  We also have a birthday party here in less than 1 month and it would be nice to have the yard looking better.

While Jacob and my dad worked on fixing the lawn mower, pressure washing in the front and back, tackling some black berry vines, trimming branches and cutting down weed explosion in the back, I put in some work in the front lawn.

It is not that big of a space, but dang there were a lot of weeds!  I don’t want to use too many chemicals in the lawn since Hunter already likes to play out there while I’m weeding, so I put in the effort and began getting the weeds out of the yard.  By hand.  This little tool sure helped!

We’re going to be ripping out half of the lawn and putting garden boxes in, so I only had to work on getting weeds out of the left half.  Still, I filled up more than 3 of these 5 gallon buckets!

As I was pulling out weeds, I realized how mossy the grass is.  It may look like we have lots of grass, but it’s pretty much half moss.  Once I finished the weeding (half done with Hunter out there on Saturday, the other half during his nap on Sunday), I spread moss killer.  Once the moss is dead (a few weeks????), I plan to fill the holes to level it out, plant some new grass in those empty spots and continue on with the care.   And what that care entails… well that is still to be determined.

I’ve actually been enjoying working out in the front yard.  Hunter is pretty good about staying on a blanket most of the time.  He has started wandering a bit more, but it’s at a slow pace.

How are you with lawn care?  Do you enjoy it?  Do you have any awesome tools that make the job easier?  I didn’t even know about that weed puller tool from whatforme.com until my friend Megan showed me on Friday.  It’s genius!

Heather