The Beginning

Scott and I both admire creative landscaping designs. Scott and I both detest mowing the lawn. Scott and I got married and decided that landscaping was to be our baby; we decided to eradicate the yard of grass and I cannot honestly say which was more important at the time--the landscaping dream or the grassless dream!

We bought, borrowed and stole landscaping books and magazines (just kidding about the "stole") and poured over them. We were clear on one point: there must be a comprehensive plan in place before we started. Eager to get moving and unaware of the Indiana clay that lie beneath the sod, I started my first project: to jazz up the area around the mailbox and hide the large, brown, ugly waterworks thingy just below the mailbox. Previously, this ugly thingy had been the mailbox's most prominent feature but it wouldn't be for long.........

Well, first off I found that digging a hole in an old corn field in Indiana was not like digging a hole in the rich soil of British Columbia's Fraser Valley. But, with shovel in hand, I persevered. Two days later (I got tired and the sun went down the first day) I had a hole that was only 2' x 3'. Not knowing the garbage pick-up 'rules' I just dumped the sod into the garbage bin for pickup. I watched out the window to witness the lifting of the bin and the setting back down of the bin. The sod did not get picked up. Plan B was hatched immediately (I didn't realize at the time that there was a Plan C--but I soon picked it up courtesy of the neighbours). I hauled bucket loads of sod to an area that was going to become my composte! We didn't have a wheel barrow at that point so it was pretty time consuming. Finally, I was sod-less.

I filled that hole back up with good soil and planted my bulbs. The neighbours' looked on skeptically--they had all planted theirs 3-4 weeks back. I pretended that I knew what I was doing and soldiered on, all the while praying to the bulb-god that it wasn't all in vain.
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