Blissfully unaware

Until February 1, 2007 I was blussfully unaware of all of the crap needed to maintain your own home. We rented. The lawn was mowed by someone else. There wasn't any extensive landscaping. I didn't care much about any of it other than the raking of the leaves and shoveling of snow in our last place. And my care was to the extent of telling DH to get it done.

Then we bought a house. Our first house. It is beautiful. I love it. It sits upon almost 1/3 of an acre. ONE THIRD of an acre of landscaping by someone who must have loved gardening. My knowledge of gardening was the following: 

1.I hate weeding. I had to do it growing up and I remember hating it. 

2. You must mow the lawn weekly. It is best if you mow the lawn the day before garbage day and not the day after garbage day.

3. You have to water the lawn and plants or they will die.

4. Shrubs and roses and stuff have to be pruned. 

5. You have to do "stuff" to fruit trees.

6. If you leave the hose on the lawn you will kill the lawn that it is covering.

7. Umm....

Our collection of yard stuff as of January 2007 was a snow shovel and a hand shovel for digging a hole to plant flowers like petunias.

Our collection of yard stuff April 2008 is a mower and seven zillion other things. Pruning shears, a folding hand saw (this is new as of today and it worked really really well!), rakes, shovels in various sizes, trimmers, a wagon, and a bunch of other things that cost a lot of money. 

Hubby and I spent four hours working outside today. We pulled a bunch of dead branches to the curb for the city pickup and I pruned some stuff in the front. And raked and pulled weeds and I am going to hurt in places I didn't know existed in the morning. We really didn't do anything last spring (we had no clue what we were doing). Reality was we really didn't know what we needed to do, heck we didn't know what plants we had! 

The yard is looking less ghetto. I don't know what I'm doing but I think I'm doing a good job of faking it. LOL.

Here are some pictures that were posted when the house was for sale. We haven't changed much. Ok, we really haven't changed anything but removing a few plants that died. Oh and that prickly stuff that covered the utility box in the corner of the yard. The power company took a chain saw to it when the power was out last year. The guy wasn't too thrilled that he had to do it either. Not my fault! I didn't even know the box existed!!