I've been workin' on the railroad, I mean backyard

I can't believe it has almost been a month since my last post. I've been working my fingers down to stubby little nubs, but it was worth all the effort for sure! The rehearsal dinner for my son and his fiance' was so fun and festive and now I have all those projects finished that I have been putting off. I even got my bathroom painted, and believe me, it really needed it!

My daughter took lots of pictures at the dinner, and I will post them when I get them. In the mean time, I took some pictures of the garden.

About a year ago I mentioned my backyard manhole. Now I have a nice gravel path from the bottom of my railroad tie stairs to my little retreat with the manhole cover floor.





And at the other end of the path I put in a retaining wall, made of recycled concrete chunks, and planted a little kitchen garden.



My friend, the plant rep, had the brilliant idea to spell out the happy couples' names in flowers and then she found an amazing deal on violas at a nursery in a neighboring town.





(Of course, they are spelled out side by side.)





I love this little flower, called "Vanilla Spoon", a variety of the "freeway daisy" because they are planted along California roads. Don't worry, I won't be putting in a freeway, even though I feel sort of like I've been working on a road crew!

Getting it all sown up.

My son is getting married later this month and we will be having the rehearsal dinner in our backyard. It has been a perfect opportunity to finish up those not quite finished parts of the yard. Today a very nice friend who knows the name of every plant God ever made, (she's a sales rep) took me out to a nursery and helped me pick out plants for all the needy areas. I am very excited about getting it all in shape and I hope I can keep it up.





I have one "retained" area that she wasn't quite sure what we should do with and we decided that a sort of a quilt-like knot garden would be fun. I have looked at this book before, and it is amazing. I am hoping to check it out from the public library tomorrow, and get a plan going.

I built a retaining wall in my lower yard from recycled, broken up concrete. I call them "driveway stones". I had some help from the men in my life (husband, son, son-in-law) but did quite a bit of toting myself. You'd think all this digging and toting I've been doing would be a good weight loss program, but I haven't noticed much change. It does make me feel strong though, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that!