So last year, after the DDD (drainage disaster of doom), our back yard was left looking like a bomb went off in it – no grass, lots of dug up areas, stumps, fences falling down.  It was really depressing.  Didn’t seem to matter to the children, they kept playing!

That said, only the literally underlying problems had been fixed, not the beautification stuff.  As a result, I planted a bunch of bulbs last fall in a last-ditch effort to make myself feel better about the devisation.  They’ve finally started to come up.  YAY for Cosco purchased bulbs!

Two weeks ago, our little kitten, Sammy, lost his collar.  The next day he went out and didn’t come home.  We’ve been looking for him ever since.  Every day that goes by seems to bring less hope…  We’re sad.

Last weekend, I finally talked my best beloved into helping to build a compost tumbler to take care of the awful pile that had been stacking up in the yard.  $5 in a barrell, some scrap lumber and some parts from the basement later, we have ourselves a compost tumbler!  MUCH better than the $200 that Gardner’s Supply wanted to charge!  We used this video here as instruction…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i-Qe75-DDQ&feature=fvsr

During the week, we finally took advantage of my inlaw’s very generous offer to pay for fencing for the yard – We purchased some chain link online for the back fence line, which I plan to use to vertically grow grapes, beans & peas on, at an unusual height of 5 ft – figuring that more vertical for growth was better!  Plus, it didn’t add that much on to the price -perhaps $200 for the extra foot.

We also purchased pool fencing.

My parents will arrive sometime this week to help with the children and Dad will put up the chain link.  (Dad rocks the construction thing…)

In other news, we demolished the old fencing on the back property line, along with all the fence on the side of the driveway.  We took the sections that were not terrible and patched the missing pickets, then took the entire sections and patched the holes in the fencing. We left 3 sections for Dad to work on (including the gate), because they were beyond our carpentry skills.  Plus, we needed some 4 x 4’s and some concrete to make it all happen and the lumber store is closed on Sundays.  Tomorrow, some purchasing.