I am a bad daughter

I shamelessly put my dad to work this week, taking advantage of his mad yard maintenance skills. He helped us figure out and buy a lot of the tools we need and also how to get started on things like getting our lawn/yard in better shape.

It turns out that my yard is a veritable jungle. Thanks to our crazy squirrels, baby and school-age oak trees are growing in all kinds of inappropriate places, including in our flower bed and under existing bushes. Ferns are everywhere too, and some are as tall or taller than our house! Plants of almost every variety are growing without restraint all around our backyard fence (two have already fallen in the midst of one storm), one mature tree just behind our deck is in fact growing up through another mature forked tree, and there just generally seems to be no rhyme or reason to just about anything growing on our property.

So, here a couple pictures I thought you might enjoy from some of our major projects this week. Here you can see my dad and Justin taking down a dead, not-so-little tree that's too close for comfort to our deck and house. Dad's using the rope to direct the falling branches away from the house, deck, and Justin. Those branches had an impressive amount of force behind them!Here's a better view of the tree.Needless to say, that was quite the project. It took us about three hours to cut off all the branches and then cut those up into firewood. But we ended up with a lot of firewood, and Justin and my dad managed not to kill themselves! We did leave some of the tree, though. Here's a goofy pic of the "tree sculpture" we ended up with. No longer a threat to our house or deck!And I won't bore you with this too much (or is it too late already? ;-), but I have to show you a before and after picture of my major project--cleaning out our absolutely overrun flowerbed. This particular task, believe it or not, took me two days. There were a lot of major roots to clear out too.

Before:

And after:

(By the way, that "tree" growing by our front door is actually one of those giant rebellious ferns I mentioned earlier.) Now it's time to fill up the flower bed! Oy. But it sure is nice to finally know how to go about some of this stuff.

What have you recently learned to do that you're proud of?