Starting Over

Every Spring, all the weeds in the world land in our yard. Ok, it may only seem that way but there are countless weeds to eliminate and numerous dead plants to replace. So my intention is to go from this weed patch to thiswithin a couple of months. Alright, I'm kidding, no matter how many weeds I pull, I'll never have the Hampton Court Palace gardens in my backyard but I am planning something more along the lines of the photo below.

OK, I'm still slightly hallucinating but our backyard does actually look very cool once it is completely cleaned up and replacement plants are in. It just takes a tremendous amount of effort to make it happen each year. The irony of it is we don't even have any grass, it's all rock and plants with a pond in the center and lots of trees. So, I'm beginning to get my head back in the game, preparing to meet the challenge, starting with picking out a bunch of plants for my friend's daughter's fundraiser. That means I need to be ready to go at the beginning of May when all those plants arrive at my door.

Hopefully I'll find a way to discourage certain squirrels who will remain nameless from digging everything up and certain raccoons who will also remain nameless, except maybe for confounded pests, from pulling baskets down, drowning squirrels in our pond and just making general, noisy, obnoxious nuisances of themselves.

If anybody out there has any sage advice, it wouldn't fall on deaf ears.