Hey everybody!!  Hope everyone is enjoying their Fall weather!  We just had a great weekend and it was made all the better with the warm weather.  Saturday night we did a ghost walk through a town not too far from here and Sunday we met some friends and went to Sesame Place.  So our weekend was pretty packed and between that and some added car work, we didn’t do any more work on our garage shoe rack.  Whomp Whomp.

Last week we did manage to squeeze in some light yard work.  I don’t think we’re going to be doing much of anything out there until Spring.  We will be taking some photos though of the leaves changing though!

To improve the look of our lawn, we spread out a couple of very large bags of grass seed.  Since we don’t have a sprinkler system, nor do we plan on installing one, it’s important that we stay on top of it with regular seeding and fertilizing.  We’ve considered adding a sprinkler system, but they usually run around $2500 for our front yard and they can add around $100 per month or more on your water bill depending upon how much you water your lawn.  The alternative to using city water is getting a well drilled on your property and using what is essentially the free well water to water your grass.  The advantage of the well is you can water as often as you’d like, but the well can cost around $3000.  Plus, if you don’t drill down deep enough, you can hit a vein of water that has high levels of iron in it, which can discolor your sidewalk by giving it a rusty color over time.  Sucks.  So, for at least for the foreseeable future, we’re going to skip the sprinkler system.  I can think of a lot of better places to sink $2500!!

In addition to our grass, there are a few areas of our yard that we’re going to restyle and clean up. Our shed needs some TLC.  The flower beds were the first flower beds we made at our new home and I made some critical errors when I made them.

For starters, the plants have grown somewhat beyond their original zones so I’ll need to expand the flower beds.  We still need to find a flowering plant to go in that empty window box.  This is the second straight season where we didn’t put anything in it.  For shame!

The other thing you may have noticed is I didn’t follow my own advice I dispensed in our Lesson’s Learned post for better looking flower beds.  All of the shed flower beds are straight rows with sharp corners.  That’s normally not too big of a deal, but having sharp corners makes it difficult to cut it easily in the riding mower.  Every time I cut the grass, I have to go back around the ramp with a weed wacker.  In the spring we’ll be curving and expanding this whole flower bed to both improve its looks and its maintenance ease.

In our garage side flower bed, we’re going to be rearranging and cleaning this mess up.

Yikes, right?  It used to be so nice!!  When we planted everything, it looked much more tame.  Like this…

Most of these plants just grew wildly bigger than we expected and started to overcrowd the bed in a bad way.  Dense flower beds can be nice or a hot mess.  This one is a hot mess.  We’re going to have to figure out what to do with this bed.  More than a couple of these guys will probably be transplanted.  I think we’ll probably reshape the flower bed as well.

That’s the bad stuff.  Here’s the good..  We love these tall grasses, especially when the extend those tall seedy things.. whatever they’re called.  Paging Mike McGrath, there’s a blogger than doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

So, that’s what’s going on in the yard.  The trees really haven’t started changing color quite yet, but stay tuned for some yard pictures when they do.

Are you scheming and planning what you’ll do with your yard next year or are you just enjoying the Fall weather?