Backyard Upgrade

I have written multiple times before about how over the years, our backyard landscaping has provided an oasis of color around our pool.  While we have a number of perennial plants that come back each year, some are invasive and seem to choke out other more desirable plants.  But the main ones uninvited are weeds.

For many years, I have been the primary person to weed and mulch our flower beds.  As I have gotten older, not only is this one of my least favorite activities, but it has also become harder and harder to do physically.  My recurring back trouble in recent years has been the primary culprit.

In 2023 when we were replacing some plants that had died over a severely cold winter, the person we had doing the work offered to weed and mulch our beds for us.  We snapped at the opportunity.  Unfortunately, there was some fall down in communication between the workers and the owner about what plants to remove and what to leave and many of our perennials got pulled up.  This then allowed those invasive plants to expand even more.

In 2024, we knew we could not rely on repeating the paid weeding process since we were not completely satisfied.  And I was unable to try to do the weeding myself as I was in the throes of my back trouble.  So, nothing was done and the invasive plants proliferated (photo from 2024 below).

When spring rolled around this year, I began to wonder what we would do about weeding the neglected backyard.  While I was over my back trouble from the prior year, I still was unwilling to do the grueling weeding myself.  And in this photo from April of this year when we had flash flood warnings which threatened to turn our pool into an infinity pool, I could see something really needed to be done about those invasive plants.

Then sometime after Memorial Day, my wife learned of a professional gardener that worked at our local botanical gardens who also did private work parttime on the side.  We had him come out to explain what we wanted done.  When he told us what he could do and what his hourly rate was, we asked him how soon he could come.

On his first day working in our backyard, my wife asked him if he could take before and after pictures of all his work and the photo above was his before picture.

I occasionally glanced out at him working that first day and I was most impressed with his techniques and his thoroughness.  He spent about three hours working and then dumped all the pulled plants into the back of his truck to be hauled off.  He then used a leaf blower to clean away any small debris left behind.

He started on these back beds and worked his way around the yard counterclockwise.  About once a week, he would come and work two or three hours doing a most thorough job.  As he cleared the beds, I knew we needed to lay down mulch to reduce the likelihood of weeds returning.

Rather than having a delivered load of mulch blocking our driveway, I have always bought bags of mulch.  I can fit eight to ten bags of mulch in the back of my wife’s Subaru Outback and over the summer, I would probably make about six to eight trips to buy mulch.  After he had been out to work a couple of times, he mentioned to my wife that he could also mulch behind himself if we had the mulch bags available.  It took me no more motivation than that to get a car load each week for him.

One of the changes we decided to make was to switch the type of mulch we used.  Historically, I have preferred shredded hardwood mulch for its rich dark natural color (and absence of that unpleasant odor of bulk mulch).  The downside is that the hardwood mulch decomposes fairly soon turning into basically compost.  This then provides the soil necessary for weeds to take root and grow.

My youngest son has typically used cedar mulch in his yard and so I thought I would give that a try. The cedar fencing surrounding our yard has lasted many years so hopefully cedar mulch would last longer too.  Although more expensive, it comes in 2 cubic foot bags rather than the 3 cubic foot bags that the hardwood mulch came in.  So, the bags weigh less and are easier for me to lift up and into my wife’s car and then haul to the backyard.  I guess next year, I’ll see if it does in fact last longer.

Once I had the mulch bags available, he turned this overgrown bed …

… into this much more pleasant bed.

Another advantage of clearing out the beds is it gave my wife the opportunity to add more flowers in the beds.  She has always loved to have a variety of different colored flowers creating a rainbow floral palette in the yard.  And if she bought them right before our gardener came, he would plant them too.

When he got to working where our gravel path is, he even pulled the weeds out of there.

And he completely cleaned up my wife’s herb garden.

Working about once a week, it took him about two months to completely redo our backyard, and we were most pleased with his work.

With this excellent professional transformation of our backyard complete, I know next year we will give him a call to address any issues that have arisen over the winter and spring!