Taking care of a yard is hard work and time consuming!  Especially when you’re older (less stamina) and don’t have a lot of extra time. 

When I bought my house in August, 2009, I knew the yard would need some extra work.  I had planned to tackle it the next spring and summer, but the summer of 2010 was spent dealing with issues involving my parents – driving back and forth to Texas, spending extended periods of time down there, and dealing with paperwork and phone calls when at home. 

So. . .  I paid a lovely young man to mow the grass and weeds – at least it didn’t look like a jungle most of the time.

This spring, I knew I had to do something because the weeds were taking over.  I hatched a plan and took action. 

First, I had to clear out the weeds and stuff.  I discovered that I couldn’t accomplish this for the whole yard at once because, as it turned out, there was a lot of stuff — old grass clippings and crushed leaves and some stuff that I didn’t recognize (Eewwww!) — that had to be cleared to get down to the soil.  So I worked on sections.  This left some really yucky patches in my yard.

After clearing out the stuff with a rake, I used the rake to rough up the top section of the soil.

The grass seed is blue, which is really good because the seeds are so small, I wouldn’t be able to see them once they were on the ground.

Next, I spread seed and fertilizer.  See the little blue seeds?

Look at all those footprints!  They remind me of dance instruction diagrams.

(Oooops!  Song interlude.  “Get Down Tonight” – K.C. and the Sunshine Band)

Then I watered, and watered, and watered.  (I also had to keep pulling out weeds that liked the fertilizer and wanted to choke out the little grass seeds that were trying to germinate.  Maybe I didn’t need to do that, but I didn’t like seeing those yucky weeds getting in the way.  I might be just a little obsessive.  Hmmmm. . .)

And now, I have patches of baby grass!  The vertical arrows show the older grass that was already there.  The horizontal arrows show the new baby grass. 

Isn’t it beautiful!!

Compare this picture to the picture of the same section above.

Hurray!!!