Every house you buy has its oddities. Sometimes the previous owner was a crackmonkey; sometimes they just did strange stuff like plumbing water lines with electrical conduit. Sometimes you buy a repossessed house, and the problems are multiplied by the time it sat vacant. We looked at a lot of houses, and the one we bought was definitely the best of the lot. There were houses we didn’t even bother going in with holes in the walls visible from the windows, and some that we were considering with no living landscape left at all, if it was ever installed.

This house had landscaping we could work with, we felt, and it wasn’t all dead either. The lawn was, but that was to be expected. It did have a lot of sort of generic stuff that I really didn’t like, like the row of red shrubs along the backyard fence, and the ugly queen palms all over the place. It was a start though, and it had good fences.

The first thing we did was to clear out the trash the previous owner left. The back area is about a third of an acre behind the backyard fence, and was knee-high in weeds and trash. There were weird piles of dirt everywhere. It was really a hassle to mow, and besides, we want to use that space.

So Junior borrowed a tractor after we’d done all we could by hand, and spent a couple of days running the box scraper around, levelling off the back field. That was also where the garden was going, and since the dogs didn’t recognize not to stomp all over freshly-tilled soil, he put up a nice fence to keep them out.

We had to do something about the lawns. We tried just fertilizing and watering them all winter to bring them back, and there was some grass there. It was patchy and ugly, with lumps and holes. So we decided to tear them out and start fresh. Junior mowed them really short and then put a couple of rounds of Round-Up on them to kill the weeds and grass. For a few week there, we were definitely the white trash of the neighborhood, with the dead lawns.

But getting to the next step of ripping them out and pulling all of the old sod was overwhelming. We had a ton of other yardwork to do anyway, so we called in reinforcements. We found a gardener who would prep the lawns for reseeding for a reasonable price, and they spent a couple of weekends working on it while we pruned trees and pulled shrubs. It was worth every penny; they pulled out cubic yards’ worth of dead sod and spread ten yards of new dirt that we bought to level it.

While they did that, we spent one day pruning and cleaning up the trees that are going to stay. There are a lot of redwoods, some liquid ambers, and a bunch of crepe myrtles that needed to be cleaned up. It was amazing the difference just doing that much did for the place; it went from looking like a jungle to looking more like a yard.

The next weekend, we squeaked into the backyard with the tractor before the lawn area was too nice to drive on. We ripped out about 15 ugly red shrubs and a couple of those queen palms. We’ll have to leave the bigger ones; they’re harder to get out than they look, and pulling those would break too much concrete. We’re not ready to open that can of worms just yet, so they’re going to stay. I don’t like them, but at least they don’t drop too much crap in the pool.

The plan is to landscape with edibles; fruit trees are going along the back fence where the uglies were, and possibly a nice asparagus bed and some artichokes. The garden is getting better and bigger by the day. There’s only corn planted in it for now, but Junior’s prepping beds and we have lots of seeds started. We plan to put some bigger, messier trees out behind the garden, where the chicken yard is going to go. A pomegranate won’t hurt anything back there, and will give the future chickens some shade. We’ve even contemplated cross-fencing the back one more time to give us a little pen for a sheep or a steer. We both believe that it’s important to know where your food comes from, and like the idea of raising our own. I like plants that are both functional and pretty too, instead of boring contractor’s special landscape shrubs that don’t add anything. And I love having a partner that likes that too, and is willing to work on it; he works harder on it than I do, that’s for sure!