Bye-Bye Yard...For Now

This last weekend, we took advantage of our ONE nice day to demolish our yard. We still had Uncle Don's bulldozer and knew that the weather was going to be yucky soon, so really, it was the perfect time to do it. I wasn't quite prepared for the inevitable mess, but knew that it had to be done sometime. Adam had been planning to create a new garden area for some time now, but because of our other projects, we had decided to wait. Funny how plans can change with just a few hours on a bulldozer :)

Before my yard turned into a giant mud pile, we had two garden areas and another small flower garden. I had already pulled all of the old raspberry bushes out of one a couple of months ago and Adam had already taken a chainsaw to a couple of large flowering bushes in the flower garden. The day before, Adam transplanted some large bushes and plants in the large garden area, so the yard was ready to be destroyed. The only thing Adam was worried about was the old, leaning apple tree...he wanted to save it. In the end, Adam leveled a large area for a garden and ripped up some stumps, grass, and weeds, to make a nice area for some new grass. While he did that, I pulled weeds, raked, and planted some herbs in a different flower garden. THEN, after all that, we mowed the lawn, took the blower to the driveway, cut down a couple of trees, etc. My goodness, you should have seen what the kids looked like at the end of the day. They gave new meaning to the term "country bumpkin."

You can see the little flower garden in the front where Adam pulled the stumps out with the dozer. In this pic he's scraping the grass off of the smaller raspberry patch to make a nice area to plant new grass.
Here, Adam's about ready to cut into the larger garden area and make it twice it's size. It was very overgrown with weeds and grass.

He tried to dig around the tree...but it eventually fell...so he took it away with the tractor.

It's hard to tell in the pic, but the yard is on a slope. He wanted to make it level so he dug into the slope (left).

It showered off and on until the afternoon. By mid-afternoon the sun was shining and the kids were down to bare feet and t-shirts. They were carried straight to the bath before dinner.