It Ain't Easy Being Green

Spring has sprung at our house. It is great to see all of our neighbors out and about, waving and chatting and puttering around their yards. Except for Joel. We still hate Joel.

It's also been nice to turn the heater off, open the windows and let the fresh air breeze through the house. It's pretty nice on our wallets too considering the frigid winter we had; our poor heater needs a rest!

We've started to look ahead a little and talk about what we want to do with our yards. It seems like everyone we live by has a green thumb so we need to step up. This is what the front yard looks like right now:


The previous owners really had a thing for boring, round bushes. They swallow up the porch. I would love to take them out and plant smaller ones, or at least a variety of plants in the front.

You see that sad holly plant to the left? It was beautiful in the winter time when it was covered in snow. Now it's just spitting annoying red seeds all over the sidewalk. It's gonna be the first thing to go. Even Mike agrees with me on that one.

We have what we think is a flower bed on the side of our house, but there were no flowers present when we moved in. We talked about planting some tomato or basil plants there, until we walked by it the other day and saw this:


This could very well be a weed, but there are three sets of them coming up, in what look like a deliberately spaced out pattern:

I'm anxious to see what starts to bloom, but if they are more bushes, I am not going to be happy.

We also noticed this suddenly growing underneath our mailbox:


Artichokes? I don't even know!

Last but not least, the back yard. I came home from work the other night to find that Mike had spent hours in the back yard raking and cleaning up the remnants of the last owners. There were ten bags of leaves piled up; he had worked so hard! We walked the lay of the land and discussed where we could put a shed, where to put flowers where the squirrels wouldn't eat them, and ran our bare feet through the lush new seedlings that were popping up. Two days later, this is what the yard looks like:


Mother nature can be so cruel.