geekchick | My laziness pays off

Last fall, I'd raked the carpet of leaves covering our entire (small) back yard into a pile in one corner, intending to bag it up and go recyle it. That never happened because it rained for several days and then I got lame. Today was a nice day (61 degrees!), so I went out back to take some measurements for the small raised beds I was thinking of putting in along the fence. Since I was out anyway, it seemed like as good a time as any to bag up those leaves; in the process I discovered that I had a nice layer of humus at the bottom of the pile and it presented the perfect shape for a corner bed. Tomorrow afternoon I think I'll swing by Lowes after I get back from the exhibit at the Kennedy Center and get some soil and some sort of retaining material, then figure out what I want to plant.

Gardening here is a bit of a challenge since the only place in the entire property that gets a fair amount of sun is one corner of the upper deck. A lot of the flowers I'd like to plant wouldn't be particularly happy, since they tend to need full sun. The front yard is mostly moss on one side (and not the decorative kind, the "this area stays really wet and shady a lot" kind) and essentially bare right in front of the front porch. That area in front of the porch floods every time it rains, so not much point trying to reseed. I put planters out on each side of the steps to try to cover up some of the bare spots, but the squirrels apparently think that it's possible to dig a hole to China through them and the little furry menaces didn't do my hostas a lot of good. I'm not sure if they're going to come back this year or not. (The hostas, I mean; I'm quite sure the squirrels will be back.)

The back yard is both short and very sloped; what grass is there is patchy and there's a lot of moss. The back corner around the air conditioning unit has been taken over by wild strawberries, and it's kind of hard to get back there to keep them trimmed back. If this was my house, I'd try replacing some of the eroded soil and maybe putting in some form of terracing. Since it's not, I'm frankly not inclined to spend the money on it; I'll settle for building a couple of raised beds. I'd also, if I owned the yard, plant things like hydrangea which I love but don't know whether my landlord would like to inherit.

Okay, time to get out and get materials to decorate the egg I promised; the first attempt at decoupage turned out to be a miserable failure, so I'm going to take a different tack.