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| Our shack as spied by Google. |
Our yard is a disaster. There’s some randomly planted natives, vegetable beds lying fallow after a mediocre summer and large areas of, well, nothing. However, this ongoing landscaping disaster brought a valuable lesson: sometimes it’s best to bring in someone from outside the household for design advice, particularly if that person knows what they are doing. Thank you Tara Kolla of Silver Lake Farms for being that person.
Yards develop emotional baggage and it’s easy to get stuck in a rut. Kolla came up with a lot of simple ideas that we would never have thought of in a million years. We’ll document the changes we make as we begin planting and hardscaping over the next few months (our quirky Mediterranean climate means that late fall is one of our prime planting seasons). Now, I gotta go fetch the machete.
Interested to see what you come up with and goes down.
It happens to the best of us, particularly if you’ve been in the same place for awhile.
By the way, when was the last time you weeded your closets?
Oh my goodness – I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you posted this. You are so not alone – I have naked berms in the front yard and in the back yard, berms overgrown with weeds and the remnants of last year’s poultry forage.
@Yanna:
None of us are alone! Life happens, you know? And gardens get neglected. Don’t feel bad. Ours went feral while we were working on our next book. I remind myself that Martha Stewart has teams of minions working on her gardens, and ever garden picture I’ve ever seen in a book or magazine has been primped and styled within an inch of its life. And photographed at the peak of the season. We can’t hold ourselves to those standards. Gardens are messy places.
Our work has stopped for now because of a crazy heat wave, but when we get back to it, we’ll take progress pictures, so you’ll get to see the chaos in detail.