Hey my thumb is turning green

Justin and I have been working in the yard. I haven't lived in a house with a yard (or any house for that matter) since I lived with my parents in high school. I didn't work in the yard there... probably a combination of the facts that my dad and brother took a lot of pride in how well they did the yard, and because I just didn't really want to. Although Justin and I don't own this house, we have both spent a lot of time working on the curb appeal. It's been good for bonding together, getting some outdoor exercise and finally breaking in my 6-year-old work gloves. Here's a photo-montage of our progress so far...

Notice all of the weeds and dead plants in the so-called flowerbed. Weeds are my arch-enemy. I have cried twice during weed pulling and have 7 blisters on my hands. This is how the front yard looked when we moved in. You can't see this but the ground is packed down like cement.


Justin is raking up leaves, sticks, beer bottle caps, pieces of sheet metal, rotten pecans, broken bricks...you know, normal things you find in a yard.

This pile of leaves on the side of our house filled 13 trash bags. We think they've been on the ground since last fall...Something to look forward to again in a few months :)

When tilling up the flowerbed, we found an old cement base- we don't know if it's a walkway or the edge of the old porch. I didn't know what to do with it, so I just covered it back up with dirt...

The aforementioned 13 trash bags of leaves...

This is the before shot of the backyard. Don't be fooled by the green grass in the front of the picture, about 2 inches below, there's a brick porch laid. In the far back, there is also more than what meets the eye...(see next picture)

Here is Justin pulling up one of the 147 50-foot long weeds in the backyard. All 147 of them ran about 2 inches under the dirt...causing nothing else to grow.

Justin and I bought calladiums and sod at Lowe's on Saturday!

Here are my beautiful caladiums. I love them. The guy at Lowe's told me that you can't water them enough, so I attacked them (in all senses of the word) with my water hose sprayer. I also took the opportunity to power-wash our house with the water hose, which I figured was a double-win because we have a clean wall, and the water fell down into the flowerbed.

Yes I do love them!

Here's Justin's sod...we're crossing our fingers that it grows!