Landscaping

Well, after many failed attempts I am sad to say I still have not been able to add a video to my blog. I have no idea what is going on with that, but back to my topic for the week.

I have never had much of green thumb and never really cared about plants and flowers until I got a house. After about a year of living here I got tired of staring at what seemed to be just a field of grass. I had received a catalog in the mail for ordering flowers so I decided to purchase some with the money we got back for our first time home buyer's tax credit. I think the total cost was about $90.00 for about 30 plants. We ordered Azaleas, lilacs, hydrangeas, maple trees, and some other bushes that I don't even remember the names of. Well we got the flowers in a tube about three weeks later. I opened the tube to find a bunch of twigs and very brief descriptions of what the twigs were. So I proceeded to plant my twigs in the yards over the course of a week. I was so excited and ready to see some results. It is now about 7 months later and the only things that grew were two Azalea bushes and three hyacinth bushes that were supposed to be white hydrangeas. Needless to say I was disappointed. So, my neighbor came over and gave me a bucket of daffodil bulbs from his garden. My husband plowed the ground to prep it for the daffodils and I spent an entire day planting the bucket of bulbs. Those have already begun to grow, and I have recovered from the sunburns and mosquito bites, so I am looking forward to seeing what the yard will look like in the spring.

We also bought white chipped marble using some of our return money to be used to replace the mulch in the flower beds that lined the house. I removed all of the mulch there (I am afraid we will get termites) and began laying fabric and pouring the rock one bag at a time along the side of the house. I got one side of the house done and ran out of rock. We had already used up the portion of the budget set aside for landscaping so I had to stop. It looks funny but eventually I will get it all done. And that brings me to weeds.

Where do all of those weeds come from!!! I pluck weeds every week or so when I have the time and it amazes me how quickly they come poking up again, especially now that there is no ground cover in those flower beds by the house because I went nuts getting all the mulch away from the house.

Meanwhile my husband has had his own battles with the yard. When we got the house we were so excited about the whole 1.2 acres of land that we forgot about the fact that we did not have a lawn mower. My dad gave us his push mower to use until we could get the funds to buy our own rider. Well midway through the summer it got so hot that my husband was only mowing one section of the yard at a time and by the time he finished all of the sections it was about time to start over again. I felt terrible for him and offered to help but he wouldn't let me. Our neighbor must have felt sorry for him too so he offered to let us use his riding mower for the rest of the summer.

We have more plans to plant more flowers around the house when we figure out what is going to grow from the first batch and what is not, and of course finish the rock around the house. We have now realized that this all can't be accomplished in one summer like I had hoped but rather it will most likely take several summers to get it the way we want it. We did manage to get the horseshoe pits up as well so we can have something to do in the "beautiful" yard during our spare time...I think we played a total of 5 times since we got it all set up. Oh well there is always next summer!

Next week, decorating~

Thanks for reading,



Jennifer Shoemaker

The Adventures of Owning a Home

Hi everyone,

I am creating this blog as part of a class assignment. After many days of thinking, I finally came up with a topic. My husband and I just bought a house about a year and a half ago and have found it to be exciting, adventurous, and surprising. We were so excited to stop throwing our money away on rent and getting our own place that we did not think about all the things that would come with buying a house. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't give up my house to go back to renting but wow. I wish we had some sort of warning before this all happened.

A little background information:

I am 25 and my husband is 27. I grew up in a home where I was mostly just responsible for keeping my room and bathroom clean along with a few other chores. My dad did all of the outside work so I had no experience in that department. My husband grew up just outside of New York City so he has no experience with this type of stuff either except shoveling feet of snow off the walkway. So this is where we begin our journey. Each week I will talk about a different topic on the adventures of owning a home. Hopefully this will make you future home buyers a little more aware when it is your turn to be responsible for your own home.

Stay tuned because my next blog is going to be about taking care of the yard and all of the little incidents that my husband and I went through this first year.

Jennifer Shoemaker