Anniversary Trip Recap, Part 1

Way back, I announced that M and I would be traveling to Yosemite to celebrate our 10th anniversary.  We were going to go for a week and fly using some frequent flyer miles we had saved up.

As we got closer to the date, however, we began to get cold feet about leaving the girls for such a long time, going so far away, and burdening our family with their care while we were gone.  We also were learning how crowded Yosemite could get in the summer time, to the point where we wondered if it would be worth the trouble.  We began to feel that, although it's definitely something we want to do in the future, this just wasn't the year for it.

Boy, am I glad we changed our minds.  The past few days have been amazing and I wouldn't trade them for all of the Yosemite vacations in the world.

I'll start my recap with our first day away from the girls... it was a "stay-cation" to work on some house things.

We spent the 4th weekend in CT with my family (which we would have missed if we had been in Yosemite! Sad!) and drove back up to MA Sunday afternoon without the girls.  I weeded the garden, M mowed the lawn, and we stopped in to our favorite gardening place that was having a 50% off everything sale.  We picked up some gorgeous rose bushes, hydrangeas, and azaleas for super cheap.

Then I made us some Hasselback Zucchini with fresh zucchini from our garden for dinner, and we ate at 8 PM (ahhh, the freedom of a late dinner with no kids!) while watching a Jane Austen documentary that I've been wanting to watch.

The next morning, we woke up early and put ourselves to work doing the final shrub ripping and planting in our front yard (I first told you about the front yard project here).

Let's have some before and after pictures, shall we?

Here's the side yard, before:

A barberry (hello thorns!!), a euonymus, and two gigantic rose of sharon bushes had taken over this side of the house.  Our poor oil man got prickered to death every time he came to fill the tank, and we had to bushwhack every time we wanted to put air conditioners in the girls' rooms.  The rose of sharon are really beautiful when they bloom in August, but they had just gotten so big and really beyond cutting back without killing or seriously damaging them.

Here's another before picture from early spring before the rose of sharon had leaves.  In this picture you can also see all of the other miscellaneous plantage that was underneath the bigger shrubs.  It probably looked nice 40 years ago, but again... overgrown.  Those hostas were the size of three football fields, and there were more of them planted up around the driveway (see them by the van?) that were even enormous-er.  Can you tell I don't dig the messy look?

After:

Whoops, sorry about my thumb.

Goodbye barberry, rose of sharon, and hostas.  Hello, gorgeous yellow knockout roses and seriously-trimmed-back-so-they're-actually-normal-sized hostas.  Yay for an oil tank fill-up that is actually reachable!

(The roses have really perked up and flowered more since I took this picture... I'll have to share another one soon.)

We kept the euonymus because it's actually very pink and romantic-looking in early spring, and I think it can be successfully cut back.  It will probably get a bit more comfortable and less squeezed-looking now that we have gotten everything else out of the way.

I think we will probably put something else in the bottom bed to the right of the euonymus, but we're not sure what.  I would love to have foxgloves and they would do well in the full sun here, but I read they're among the most poisonous of plants and you shouldn't grow them if you have little kids.  Bummer.  Any suggestions?  Irises perhaps?  If not, we have plenty of overgrown hostas we could throw back in there!

The empty bed in front we're just going to seed in with grass so there's less to take care of.

Okay, so the front.

Before:

(Haha... there's M underneath the front shrub, already ripping it out as I took the picture!)

Look at those hostas (on the far right by the driveway)!  Huge, right?  Like, half the size of our house.

After:

Now the only problem will be getting the Christmas tree stain off the siding.  Any suggestions on that?

We greatly reduced the size of this front bed (again, we'll grass-seed the dirt in the front where the old bed was).  We cut one of our mammoth hostas into four different plants and interspersed them with my new hydrangeas.  These hydrangeas will only get to be about 4 feet high and 4 feet wide, so we'll never have to rip out a 15-foot shrub again.  I think M is glad of that.

Cutting back the size of the bed means we will have to buy less mulch and it will cost us less to maintain over the long-term.  And it looks much neater, no?

In the more shady bed on the left side of the house we put in three azaleas.  These should be pretty in the spring (and they don't get very big, either)!  We also cut that bed size by about half, as you can see.

Across the front of the yard, I planted some bare root peonies that I got at Ocean State Job Lot for $1 each.  It's the wrong time of year to put them in the ground, but since they were on clearance and already looking pretty dry and withered I felt an urgency to get them planted.  I don't think they will all survive, but hey, they were $1.  My goal is to have a line of peonies out front so the ones that don't sprout I can fill in with live plants next spring.  I moved my established peonies to the front, as you can see, and so far they seem to really like their new home.

Eventually, we'd like to build a fence right behind the peony bed, and also re-route the walkway so it connects directly to the driveway.  Next year perhaps.

I also planted some bare root clematis under our current fence in the side yard.  Those were also $1 and I don't really have high hopes for them, so I didn't take a picture.  But I'll let you know (and of course share pictures) if they do anything!

Sooooooo... that's the long story of our first day anniversary stay-cation.  Exciting, right?  Don't worry, it gets better from here.

We spent until about 2 PM working in the yard and then had lunch, showered, and packed ourselves up to leave.  By 4 PM we were on the road to the White Mountains of New Hampshire.  We got some Subway on the way, checked into our hotel in Lincoln, snuggled up in bed, and passed out in the middle of an episode of Star Trek TNG on Hulu.  Yard work is tough stuff!

To be continued!

(Hop on over to part 2 here.)