After calling Diggers Hotline earlier in the week to make sure I wasn't near any buried utilities (even though I was 99.9% certain there weren't), I woke up early Saturday morning, grabbed my handy Maddock and started digging up the area and, with the help of my mom, we worked it up as well as we could. We also found out why the grass didn't grow well...seems that, like most masons, the guys who put my patio in were a bit sloppy, and buried the extra cement about an inch under ground...deep enough to hide, but not deep enough to let the grass roots take hold. Saturday night, Dad brought over the rototiller and we (yes, we...he actually let me use power tools - probably because it was actually my brother's) tilled the area, and by Sunday we were planting the grasses and flowers I'd bought. Take note: The entire time we were working on the project, the supervisor (a/k/a my cat) watched safely from his perch at the patio door.
Of course, what I had bought didn't quite fill the area, so I decided I needed to run to get a few more plants, and maybe, just maybe some sort of garden statue or animal to fill the space between the hose reel and the water fountain. Monday morning Mom and I made another trip to Plymouth, first stopping at Fleet Farm, where I got the most AWESOME frog whom the neighbor kids later named Ribbit and then went to the nursery for one more plant run. The rest of the project would have to wait, though, since we couldn't get the mulch until after the holiday.
Someone needs to tell my dad that his daughter is NOT a morning person, because he was at my house before 6:30 Saturday morning with the mulch, and was ready to get moving. Of course, he had the worse end of the deal, since he was the one carrying the mulch in 5 gallon buckets because the wheelbarrow tire had a blow-out the weekend before. My job was simply to spread the mulch. In the end, though, all of the hard work was worth it.
After two weekends of supervising, the cat is ready for the yard work to be over so he can get back to his normal life...all of this planting is hard work!
