Presto--a yard!

So, twelve hours earlier Lazy Gnome was bracing herself on this very blog-thing for hours of sweat and tears over the next week to slop around with mulch, yet as she approached the house, the three fabulous Landscape Gentlemen were finishing off the sod and had done 75% or more of the mulch! There was a bit of guilt; enough for LG to get into her scrubs and help spread around the rest of it, but she's happy--even if they charge her more, she is a happy camper!

The bigger picture: yes, there is still a lot of work for LG--planting ALL those shrubs the landscaper will eventually deliver, and moving those that wintered next door. However, she now feels, finally, that she has a yard, that the eyes of the neighbours and those dog walkers or cyclists happening past won't be looking quite as critically at her place. She has returned this lot--well, once the sod takes root, literally--to a more upstanding member of the neighbourhood.

Now LG simply has to, well, pay for all this...and try not to think about all the moola she has sunk into this house and property over the past 22 months...there is more to come. Tomorrow, for instance, the Floor Guy will be installing laminate in the basement room and the maybe Window Guy will stop by to develop a quote to replace the original wood-framed windows in the basement...and LG started on a WHIM to paint the bathroom--that will be a five-week project if she doesn't get going...and then there's the hot water tank that has been sitting in its box in the basement since Thanksgiving...it just never ends!! Oh--then the basement room will need to be trimmed and the electrical finished...when all she really wants to do is remove the awning above the north living room window and sit outside and read on the front steps...

Well, she's rambling and sadly not very elequent. She's also not as relieved as she thought she would be to have arrived at this stage...oh, that's right: there's the wee conflict with the Garage Guy, including the fact that something he has left may be severely dangerous...sigh.

Anyway, now perhaps LG can dedicate more of this space to discussing the virtues of actual plants....

Here's book for a paranoid gardener on a rainy day: Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln's Mother and other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart. LG picked this up in the midst of that wicked winter we just survived, and read in horror about all the nasty plants we all probably have in our gardens. Despite the arctic-temperatures and the soothing ride home on the bus from Whyte that Saturday afternoon, a chill went down LG's spine to read that azaleas (so gorgeous!), foxglove (an LG fav since finding them wild across Ireland), and lobelia (that reassuringly successful annual for pots), and the hydrangea (which LG has ordered to be added to this new yard!!) each have tendencies to be nasty!! Yikes!!

Cheers for now, as a giddy LG bids you a good night....

"The coward's weapon, poison"~~Phineas Fletcher, 1614