Site Assessment
I tweeted the other day that I found my yard. For those of you not living in the upper midwest, you may not realize that we had a LOT of snow on the ground this year. From the 5th of December until basically the 5th of March, I never got a look at my yard, save for the snow cover.
Yesterday, I actually walked out into my yard for the first time in those three months. Did so again this morning, this time making a cursory inspection of things, starting to determine all the things I’ll need to get done in the next month or so. Here’s what I learned.
- The dog is hard on the yard. There is, shall we say, a substantial amount of evidence scattered about the yard as to the presence of our dog this winter.
- As a corollary to point #1, the dog was very hard on one of my downspouts. I think she thought it was the lair of a delicious squirrel and as such tried to extract the tasty rodent. This led to a slight incursion of moisture into our basement. Thankfully, I have home repair skills, and I made what should be the permanent repair to said downspout.
- My garden makes me sad in March. Oh, how I long to walk barefoot to my garden on a humid night and bring back approximately eight thousand dollars worth of fresh basil. Alas, the salad days, as they were, are still months away.
- The fence gate that I thought I properly engineered? I failed gate engineering. It requires a pretty substantial rebuild.
- I have a surface grade problem at my foundation. Also, I need to get some ground cover going to mitigate erosion.
None of these are really giant issues. The thing is, when you have a piece of paper that says “Bachelor of Landscape Architecture”, there really isn’t any excuse for any of this other than laziness. I’m pretty well beyond the pressure to have my yard look beautiful, but I’d at least like it to not be falling apart.