The Battle for My Yard

My yard is fighting to turn back into forest, and this is the first spring/summer I've been (semi) home enough to show it who's boss. It's slow going, but I put my foot down about a few things. I arranged to have our rotten tree chopped down and hauled away (by redneck ninjas) and I made a new little flower bed in front. I replaced a bunch of half dead shrubs with flowering perennials and I planted our raised garden beds.


The next thing on my list has been the grass. My front yard is actually starting to look like the forest floor. Our 2 huge oak trees drop acorns all over it, plus there's moss, mushrooms, wild violets and other random weeds crowding out my ever thinning grass.

A couple of months ago I started saving Tru-Green coupons and I bought a big bag of fertilizer/weed killer and one of those broadcast spreaders you assemble yourself.

Thank goodness I haven't gotten around to dousing my yard with all those chemicals! Over the past week I discovered a little frog hopping across my yard. My daughter was so excited to hold him. We put him into our garden and set up a little shady spot for him with a cool whip container of water. I haven't seen him since, but I hope he's hopping around back there somewhere.

Then today a tiny bird exploded out of one of our shrubs. I looked and sure enough there was the tiniest little nest in there. Hopefully I didn't scare the mama bird away for good with my picture taking. I also discovered a nest of baby birds in the beams supporting our upstairs patio.

No way am I going to fertilize my yard now. I guess the forest wins this round, but I feel like the real winner. And hey, my yard might not be very grassy, but it's green! Now I just need to get my daughter excited about the great outdoors: