Hard Work DOES pay off!

I'll never forget the day I arrived home in early March, after being out of town for 7 days, to find this....

With a "hard" winter for South Texas coming to an end... Spring had sprung THE WORST WEEDS I HAD EVER SEEN and all in just 7 days! Crazy! Blake is proud that he is amongst the 4 home owners on our street of around 45 that does not have a "lawn care" service to take care of our lawn. Although I look forward to that "perk" in a few years, we really do enjoy the satisfaction of caring for our yard ourselves right now. I am doing this post mainly for Blake and I to remember in 20 years. I am strong believer in LOVING the home you live in and when I saw this front yard in early March, it made me sick pulling out of my driveway every single morning. Blake doesn't know I have taken "before" and "after" pictures of our efforts and it really has been a lot of the BOTH - teamwork and effort! Immediately, I invested 6 hours researching our options for weed control and prevention. I spent a few hours on the Internet and a few hours at major nurseries around town. I decided that we were going to do this weed control organically.  The funny thing was that I don't really even care about eating organically or all the other hype about organic clothing and such but I suddenly decided that I was going to not use a single chemical on my yard and instead pull by hand every single week in our yard. I am a pretty extremely driven person and for almost a week straight, I spent 2-3 hours in the yard pulling these....

..bucket after bucket after large industrial strength black garbage bag after garbage bag of weeds. It was so bad that I had 6 different neighbors come talk to me about other options that are on the market. Our amazing neighbors Jack and Nancy even went to Lowe's one day and purchased a huge bottle of weed killer for me and brought it over and said they don't want to see me on my hands and knees another day. As hard headed and determined as I am, I admitted that I needed to get the millions of weeds under control first and from that point forward I could attempt organic weed control!!! One of the other major recommendations was investing in a high quality top dressing/compost to be put down. Well, I guess, it happened to be the BUSIEST 2 weeks in the WORLD for lawn care companies because I couldn't even get them to return my calls. Once I finally got an estimate and found out it was going to be nearly $1000 to do compost our massive front and back yard... I remembered that Blake had a few vacation days he needed to use before he lost them and threw out the idea of him and I having a bonding day to compost our yard. My amazing husband was immediately on board and that was in LATE MARCH we worked so incredibly hard and yet STILL had the ugliest yard on the street.

 We watered religiously, had a sprinkler company come and spend 7 hours at our house with me over seeing their every move (I know... poor guys but we had been burned my some sprinkler guys a couple years back) to fix 60 plus heads in our yard and ensure we had perfect water coverage. We have sprayed the weeds 2-3 times and I have even hand fertilized the weaker sections of the grass with miracle grow. Blake got several new zoysia sod squares and planted them in the bare spots in the back yard. I seeded new Bermuda grass in the bare areas in the front. Like I said, this has been a major effort but one we both felt strongly about achieving together for our home we LOVE so much. So I just took some after shots last week and I think it will be most impactful to show the before and afters together. Blake, I am so proud of your efforts and every day as we pull out of our driveway, the kids say, "Bye beautiful house and yard!" I love you and thank you for being simply amazing and SO hardworking and patient with me when I have these perfectionist moments and goals.

Group 1: Before and After

2 group: Before and After

Group 3: Before and After

Group 4: Before and After

It is truly so lush now that Maverick got his own photo shoot in it...

This just reconfirms what Blake and I can accomplish working together. We laugh about our first and last "10 YARDS (entire dump truck) of composting day" together but it is ALL WORTH IT when we look at the results. :)