Soggy Facelift....

 "My extravagance is my garden. It's the first thing I look at every morning. It gives me so  much pleasure..." -Ina Garten

 And so the muddy, soggy  facelift continues......supervised by Spencer, who visits from up the hill and three houses down. He has his own flowerpot.

 Before the garden crew started to dig, the patio looked like this.Tired. Dull. Annoying cause it looked like cows had chewed on it.

 It used to be a small trench of sedums that I started by laying in dirt along the cracks.They were nice. English garden look. But only lasted one year. 

 Then over the past six years it got out of hand...

 Wayyyyyyyy out of hand. Humps of grass tripping and trapping everyone who tried to walk over them.

 So today.....finally ...it was time for a change.  Something new. 

 The garden crew was amazing......they chopped  those grass clumps and lugged them onto tarps.

 Then the tarps were hauled out to the top of our steep driveway...waiting to be picked up to be taken to compost dump.

 Even the birds wondered what was going on. Hundreds of juncos and robins tried to feed in the rain. There was nothing but mud sloshing. Rain drowning. Shovels scraping.

 "Weather means more when you are gardening.Nothing like listening to a shower...."-M. Cox

 Chop chop. Hack Hack.  I watched the crew smash away the weeds, the grass, the muck.

 Spencer and Cordelia  stayed out of the way. 

 After three hours, the crew had scraped away most of the mess.

 More tarps were brought out. While the rain pounded down. Another two hours went by.

 And then it was CLEAR. 

 Space and more space.Like a huge weight taken away,  I could imagine all the more pots I could have now.Stuffed with tomatoes and flowers and things to make bees buzz. Pots and more pots..... oh, the anticipation of stuffing things into dirt in pots......

 "I like gardening.....it's a place where I find myself, when I need to lose myself...." -Alice Sebold

Photographs 2018