Gardening... aka working miracles

My absence has been due to my Mum coming over for the last 10 days to help clean up the chaos that was our garden. I have the blackest thumb around unless it's a weed and quite frankly gardening is one of my least favourite chores. Especially in the Louisiana heat.

We spent 6 days of constant cutting, clearing, hauling and laying down mulch. It's nothing special but it should be easy to maintain over the winter and even I should have a hard time killing it. We weren't going for much more than providing a blank slate for prospective gardeners or a should look prettier in a few months, easy to maintain for the non gardener. If we are still here in spring I'll most likely brighten it up with some bedding plants. 

I didn't get too sore thankfully but I did go to bed early every night absolutely shattered. 

This is what we accomplished in 6 days. 

There are a couple of oak trees growing in on the right there that were not fun to remove. And there was a bramble that has gotten itself all through the Wisteria and Azaleas that is responsible for a lot of scratches and rude words. The Azaleas are all coming up as they are pretty much dead. I still have to finish off cleaning up the bed to the right. We made pretty good progress though. The front of the house was our main goal and what took up most of our time. 

Just to give you some idea, the bird bath you see below is actually under all the weeds in the picture above. Mum had also cut some of the ivy stuff before we thought to grab the camera and it was actually growing pretty thickly up the centre post of the car port. 

You can see the bigger pics here: Taming the Garden

We then spent the weekend in hot springs hiking around 6 miles of Garven's Woodland Garden trails, climbing 15 flights of stairs up to the top of the mountain tower and then hiking around town shopping. I am exhausted.