Every spring, I mulch my gardens.

I have it delivered usually the first week of May. I order roughly 14 cubic yards. I load it into our dump cart that attaches to the riding mower and that makes it easier to get it spread into all of my different garden areas.

I like all of the gardens to be mulched by Memorial Day weekend, but sometimes either the weather or my life doesn’t cooperate. Last May was very busy and for wonderful reasons.

I needed to focus on my gardens because I was emotionally overwhelmed by all of the changes that would happen in August. My girls were headed off to amazing adventures.

My usual mulching was not going to get me through this stage of parenting. There’s always something to do in my yard, but I needed a project that would last me through at least fall.

I decided to create a new garden.

Removed the frame that was part of our old wooden playset.

Used the Puller Bear tool (https://www.pullerbear.com) to help. It’s designed more for weed tree removal, but helped get this wooden frame out of the ground.

Made a rough outline of location and shape of the garden using my garden hose.

I left room for future expansion.

Added many bags of garden soil and planted some foundation plants. I divided some hostas, peonies and sedum, moved some ornamental grasses that were suffering in a partly shady area, and then mulched. I added some bulbs in the fall and called it done until 2025. It’s a bit underwhelming, but there’s no rush. All of my gardens are a work in progress.

We planted two apple trees 2 years ago (one pictured above in the new garden) and 2 peach trees last fall. I’m new to growing and caring for fruit trees, so wish me luck. I’ll talk more about that in the future.

Then I decided that I wanted to do some yard clearing.

Asked my husband if he was in or if he was out. You know, giving him the choice.

You can see in these older photos how closed in my yard was with the overgrown weed trees. It gave my yard a lot of privacy and was wonderful for the wildlife and it isn’t that it looked so terrible, but my yard was feeling smaller and smaller. I had worked on the left side already in the previous couple of years, so I thought I’d start the other side pictured below.

I went to look for an attachment for my Stihl Kombi system.

I ended up with the brushcutter and it’s AMAZING! Made much more sense than my initial thoughts of using loppers and then using the chainsaw.

It seemed like this would be a smaller job than it ended up being.

Branches, branches, branches for days and days. We hauled some to the curb and burned some that were dead wood. I had tree companies come to give estimates on chipping it all or dragging it away. Opted not to do that. haha I lived in my yard all day until the sun set. It’s as if doing the left side of my yard was wiped from my memory.

After all of this, I can’t even find a pic of how we left things last fall.

So here’s a pic taken today. I have around 12 more weed trees to cut down this spring. I am not entirely sure what I want to plant there, but I have some ideas and I’ll share them in the future.

I wasn’t even done with this side yard and wanted to start the back section.

So that’s what I did.

This is before

This is after.

There’s still a lot to do this spring and summer.

But it’s opened up quite a bit.

There’s just SO much left. But I’m at the halfway point. I’ll add a winter updated pic.

While this doesn’t completely cover everything in the last 2-4 years, it’s a good starting point of the most recent changes. I’ll share more of my other gardens as I cover more specific garden topics.