Yard Work

Yesterday, i decided to finally do something about our back yard. We basically hadn't touched it in, oh, a year and a half, so it was a bit overgrown. The picture is of the back yard, after i got through. i didn't think of taking a before picture until partway through, so you won't be able to compare. The pile in the middle is all from three bush/tree monstrosities - we're going to have to take it all to get recycled. In the foreground are some yard debris bags. i filled over seven of them. Our front yard still needs some work as well, but it is better maintained because it is actually visible to the rest of the world.

Our back yard isn't very large, but it has no grass at all, just a lot of plants. And all of the plants grow like weeds during the spring/summer (and you should see the weeds grow). When i went out to slaughter everything, the roses were between six and seven feet tall, and every plant was competing to take over the yard. So the desolation that is currently our back yard will look nice and healthy by May and will probably be overgrown again come next fall.

Technically, doing yard work once every year and a half for a couple days works out great on the efficiency scale. Let's see... 16 hours/1.5 years works out to about 105 seconds per day. Not too bad. In real life, however, the cost is much higher in terms of time spent keeping up/time enjoying. Even if we were able to enjoy it for 3 months, that would be 10 minutes per day. Not to mention that the slash-n-grow technique results in suboptimal results even for those 3 months. A well-tended garden looks much nicer than one on its way from bare to out of control. Hopefully we'll be able to stay on top of it a little better this time.