Warning: 10 ugly picutres... and one really beautiful one.

I'll give you the pretty one first.

This is my yard this morning. How beautiful is that weeping cherry tree?!? The kids and I sat under it, playing Uno last night until it started getting really cold. It was so nice. Every day it gets brighter and more full with blooms. It is stunning! And right outside my kitchen window.

Ok, now on to the ugly. Building an urban homestead isn't always easy. Well, I will actually go so far as to say it is never easy. But there are things that can make it easier. Having dirt is one of those things.... (I'll get to that in a minute)... and having gardeners in the house before you is another. We did not have gardeners here before us. We had landscapers. Non-organic landscapers. To get their beautiful yard the way they wanted it, they maintained an unnatural love of two things. Tarps and the hedge trimmer.

The hedge trimmer was employed to trim everything in the yard to a perfect ball shape that looks beautiful! Until fall, when you realise that the plants only bloom on the outer inch of the 4 - 6 ft wide ball because NO light gets to the inside of the bush. None. Now, for a couple years, this isn't bad. Not at all. But for the 32 years this wonderful couple lived in this house... well these plants are now really suffering.

Let's move on to tarps. This is a 5 minute walk around my garden spot (treat it like an I-Spy game... I Spy PLASTIC!):

And more plastic:

And plastic again:

Their love of tarps was just something unnatural. There is at least one (most of the time two) under EVERY GARDEN IN THE YARD. This means flower gardens, veggie gardens, bulb gardens... even under the grass in most places. There is one tarp that was obviously set down to ward off weeds. Then about 8 inches down, there is ANOTHER tarp. Not sure what this one is for, and we only discovered it while digging for the apple trees... but we have found them all over now that we know what to look for. It is CRAZY! I have thrown away more plastic since we have started this garden project than I can remember throwing away... well, ever!

What is craziest about this whole thing is that it doesn't even keep the weeds out! I have chickweed (which I do eat, actually) and vetch and even things like ivy, growing all over the place right now. Sigh. The plastic doesn't help. It is just more work.

And dirt. We don't have dirt here. We have rocks. Oh the rocks! There are so many rocks in this yard that you could suck up the actual dirt with a shop vac. Seriously.

This pile is from a 2X2ft hole that we dug to place one of our apple trees. It took sacrificing a shovel and buying a pick ax to make the hole that big. And this is what we pulled out. We ended up buying dirt to fill the hole with because there was no way we were going to put all of these rocks on top of that poor baby tree roots. I am happy it is done, but getting those trees into the ground was back breaking work.

I can say a little bit of good from these projects though...

This is the rock garden my oldest made with the rocks that he pulled from the dirt piles from the other three trees. He hasn't gone through the last pile (pictured above). He doesn't need to. The rock garden is complete. It is the entire length of the back of our rambler. lol! But it looks pretty. I think I may have him start on the front gardens next. Lord knows, we have enough rocks.