When Pegs came to visit and see the house for the first time, she helped Hunter and I come up with a low maintenance landscape plan.  If you know me, then you know I don’t have a green thumb and have basically no idea about gardening or how to take care of plants besides watering them (I didn’t get those Pfeiffer genes).  Turns out, there’s a lot to learn, and Pegs is a great teacher / Master Gardener.

One of the first tasks we took on was cutting back the box shrubs in front of the patio and the huge shrubs on the side. Note: There is a wrong way to prune bushes, and the previous owners were really good at it.  The box shrubs really bothered me for some reason and we literally cut them back all the way, so they can start fresh and grow more naturally and healthy.  Apparently this puts them in shock, and it takes a little bit longer for them to start growing back.. so if you come by the house and see reallllly cut back shrubs — we did it on purpose.

The next project was to tackle the completely out of control shrubs to the right of our yard, and in front of the office window.  We had to use a plethora of tools to cut these bad boys back: a saw, big clippers and tiny shears.  Plus there were some massive weeds that had grown in with the shrubs that had to be completely pulled out too.  To give you an idea of how out of control they really were — they had grown about 7 feet out from the actual stem, and there were no leaves on the branches except at the outer most areas.  The yard trimmings from those two projects formed a huge hedge across our front yard at the street, it was crazy.

The wax myrtle that was in our yard by the shrubs turned out to be dead (a neighbor told us it died 3 years ago in an ice storm), so two weekends later, we cut it down.  Hunter’s dad is extremely handy and brought down a few tools, namely a chain saw, and we got after it on a beautiful Saturday morning.  Fifteen minutes later, the tree was down, the branches on the street, and we had some new firewood in the back.  Scott also helped us clean up a tree in the backyard before we headed to lunch.

Lessons Learned:

• Yard work is no joke — I was exhausted and sore afterwards.
• I actually like yard work when I own the yard.  Funny how that works..
• We have awesome and very smart parents!  Thanks for all the help!!

Now we have a landscape plan we can handle, and a yard that’s in much better shape!  Next outdoor project: regrowing the grass in the front…  PS- You can check out more pictures of the house and our (slow) progress here.