Even the grass needs an update

I'm honestly not sure if the pictures will do this justice, but you'll just have to believe me that our yard had a problem. See at one point, there was another garden, in a different location, and you, well, ok, you can't really see it in the picture below, but believe me, there was an obvious depression spanning between the gutters. Even the grass there was different, sparser and more weeds. So we decided we'd fix it up and rented, that's right, a rototiller.

Mark and Roy came over to help and we got going on the lawn. Well, Matt and Mark did, Roy and I spent the day cleaning out the flowerbeds and taking down some dead branches on the pine.

In no time we had the whole area tilled up, then it was time to add more dirt so that it wasn't such and obvious depression.

Afther that, the entire thing had to be tamped down

Then we seeded and covered it with hay

Fast forward a few months and you can barely tell! (ok the new grass is just a little greener than the old, but when we reseed the whole lawn next year it should blend right in. And, on the vastly improved side, no more obvious depression in the lawn!)

New flowerbed

Well, you'd think with all the weeding I've been doing, we'd stay clear of adding more work to our plate. But, the garage was feeling lonely, and Matt was tired of taking the paint off the garage siding with the weed whacker, so while we had the rototiller (more about that in another post) we chewed up some of the grass by the garage and had at it:

Before:

And rototilled (you notice I also corrected for a significant dip in the yard with some left over dirt we had):

Then of course we added soeme plants, mulch and grass and waited a bit...pretty isn't it?

But, we didn't stop there, you didn't think we'd forgotten about all that stone we bought, oh, probably a year ago...

Of course not! So we got back out there, and started digging. 

 Then we filled the ditch with sand, so as to help with the leveling.

And resurrected an old friend, new and improved, of course. Matt decided "Tampy Baldwin" was a good name for this new incarnation of our old tamper. (for those of you non-wisconsinites). It was much improved, see the cushy handle and the heavier tamping block? Much nicer.

You can see below why any old tamper wouldn't do, even though after our last encounter with homemade tampers we did break down and buy one, it wasn't exactly shaped for this line of work. Old Tampy worked like a charm though.

 Here we are, almost done, just need to finish up the corner!