Der Feuervogel aufersteht.

Every year, we get nastygrams from our HOA telling us we need to put poison on our lawn. We're anti-poison, as a rule, except in certain situations like Japanese beetles and tent caterpillars, and anti-lush-green-chemlawns, especially in drought-prone North Carolina. We have a peaceful relationship with the five-lined skinks who live around our house and eat bugs. So our lawn is kind of a mess.

I've declared war on our lawn several times, but we've never really gotten around to doing anything about it. One reason is because it's fucking expensive to get plants and dirt and mulch, and we're not exactly raking in the dough with me functionally unemployed. (I have a job. It doesn't get me any work. Temp agencies BLOW.)

So, the front of our yard, between the driveway and the cherry tree, currently is covered by anti-weed tarp in preparation for being buried with dirt and mulch, in which I plan to plant a forsythia or two (or a forsythia and a rosemary) soon, mums this fall, heather when I find it (fall maybe?), and two split creeping phlox (once they've stopped flowering and I can dig them up and gently break them in half). We're spending $130ish on dirt and mulch (delivered), plus the $20 on the tarp, plus the $20 on the forsythia, plus however much another forsythia costs, plus the mums and heather this fall, so all told it'll be about $300 just for this 225 sq ft patch of lawn.

And there's at least that much between the cherry tree and the front of the house, and close to that much on the other side of the driveway back to the yard (where I'd like to put more weed tarp down and cover it with flagstones and maybe decorative gravel, and see about putting in a creeping thyme or two; I have a huge caraway thyme I can split, once I figure out how).

So we're spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars to keep the nosy fucking neighbors association off our backs. Money that we could spend on much more useful things, or put away for an eventual backyard/deck redo. (If I could somehow persuade my uncle to bring his Heinrich Family Builders skillz down here, we could save on a contractor, but... What I'd like is a screened porch where our deck is, so we can sit outside and enjoy the yard without the sun baking us. It's southwest-facing, so afternoon sun is the devil. We could put blinds on the one side, and get a ceiling fan or two. Then I want a patio of some sort accessible from the porch where we can grill. We don't grill often, but you can't really do it inside a screened porch. My uncle can do it; he did some AMAZING work on his own yard, but it's not like we can say "drive 6-7 hours to our house and build our deck for us.")

We knew we'd have to maintain certain standards when we moved in; it doesn't help that almost every year we've lived here, the town has had water restrictions (ie, no lawn watering) at some point during the summer. So we don't really water the lawn, but we do keep it mowed, relatively.

I do like puttering about in the garden and growing herbs (too many skwerlz and deer for growing veggies, and the HOA doesn't allow certain things, anyway. I hope they don't mind the blackberry bush Ben just planted). I don't like lawn maintenance or major gardening efforts. I could survive with urban gardening in a flat in Berlin, as long as I have a sunny balcony.