The Technical Term is "Hardscape"

As I mentioned recently, Beckett has been in charge of the landscaping in the backyard, which has resulted in a lot of mud and poop. Not so much with the grass and flowers. So I have been trying recently to rectify it.

The good thing, and the bad thing, is that it's very slow work. Our yard is such a disaster. We made some progress the first two summers we were here. We tore out overgrown bushes, planted some flowers ... Keith and my dad even built a deck! But last summer was the time of contractors, and Eleanor's arrival. And between the two, our yard has been covered in trash and weeds ever since.

A few weeks ago, I FINALLY got around to picking up most of the trash that the contractors left behind. Now I'm onto picking up refuse that we ourselves have left behind. What I mean by that is, when we put in the deck, city code required us to put a layer of gravel underneath, to keep down weeds. Which is all fine and good .... but we neglected to use anything to keep the gravel actually under the deck. Fast forward nearly 2 years later, and there is a slowly expanding ring of gravel being ground into the area around the deck.

What I thought was a Sunday afternoon project, which quickly turned into this week's project, and is well on it's way to becoming the summer-long project, is getting all of that gravel up and out of the way, and the gravel that is still under the deck contained. This feels like a case of one step forward, two steps back. The deck is wonderful ... but why didn't we just take care of the gravel the first time around?!?

I'd like to think that this is a learning experience, but I doubt it will be. Two years from now, I'll be bemoaning something else that I did this summer and never really got around to tidying up. At least one nice thing about yard work is that you never really expect it to end, anyway. So the fact that there's always something else isn't really that perturbing. At least, that's what I'm going with for now.