Yard Work Galore

So Ashley invited her 13 year old nephew over to help with some yard work.  What a great idea.  He spent a good amount of time weeding and mowing the front and back lawn on Friday while I worked and then we spent 8 hours on Saturday weeding between the garden boxes, weeding the area behind our fence (in the wetlands), cutting down a huge weed/bush, laying several layers of weed barrier, and then finally moving several wheel barrows worth of rocks from behind the fence to between the garden boxes.  What a tremendous amount of work!  I am posting some "after" pictures of everything.  I wish you could see how much of a change there was in the before and after.

Let me tell you, that 13 year old worked hard and between the two of us we got significantly more done that I could have done in probably 3 weekends by myself.  It was tremendous and I'm glad he allowed us to pay him well for his work.  It was a long, super hot and sweaty day and I for one can barely move between being sun burnt and sore.  It was totally worth it though after seeing the results.  Thank you for everything you did...  It was amazing!

Before our work the in between spaces were filled with ripped up weed barrier and dirt.  Oh and a ton of weeds that were pretty tall since they were getting  a lot of water from our awesome garden boxes and drip system. 

We will not be getting lots of weeds in between the boxes anymore and that makes me so happy.  

Because our house backs up to a wetlands area we get some really cool benefits (deer coming up to our fence regularly, tons of rare birds flying around and no back yard neighbors) and some pretty cruddy drawbacks (tons of flies and mosquitoes and a lot of invasion weeds).  We were not able to truly enjoy our beautiful view recently because the weeds had grown so much that they were blocking our line of sight.  Look at it now...  It's gorgeous!

This is the view to the left of the last picture.  Bringing down those weeds brought us some beautiful scenery back.

I'm not sure that you can get a sense of how big this root is.  We took down a 7 foot weed... umm  I mean bush... erm...  Yeah it was pretty much a tree.  The last piece that we struggled with was this tangle of roots.  After digging it up for a while it simply wouldn't budge.  Two reciprocating blades later and this monster came out.  Having that thing gone makes our back yard look even better. 

Here's the work that our nephew did.  Look at that...  Just flowers...  No weeds.  It's awesome!  He did such a great job.

A view to the right.

You can see our tree and pumpkin plants going crazy here which is awesome.  The better part of this view is that we weren't able to see the dirt and the pumpkins due to the crazy weeds.  This area can creep up on you like crazy because of the wetlands and the watering system we have in place.  Looking good now.  Still needs a bit of work but man is this awesome.