This is our sixth year in this house, and my fourth or fifth season for improving our backyard. (I don’t think I did a single thing to the yard last year. Did you know when you have a baby you get a year off from yardwork? It’s a fact.)
I’ve talked about the state of our backyard before. I plant things, they die. This is what happens. It’s my specialty.
This space has been an uphill battle for years, and it’s still not a place we can spend a lot of time in (no privacy fences, no deck). Yet every time I clean out a load of weeds or pull invasive vines off the fences, I feel like we’re making some sort of progress.
But the one thing that has made the most difference this season? Filling the space up with things that aren’t actually alive. The girls got a playhouse for their birthdays, my mom gave me a bird bath, and my dad gave me a tree ring “planter” he cut from a log. (More on that below.)
None of this is revolutionary or fancy, but they’ve dotted the yard with focal points and kind of takes your eyes off all the plants that don’t look like much from far away. Our yard is deceptively large, and small plants don’t make much of an impact.
Anyway, about that tree ring planter. My parents had some large trees taken down at their house, one of which was completely hollow on the inside. My dad cut the log into chunks and voilà, planter.
Elise wanted to bury a treasure inside, so we filled up a can (from some fancy hot chocolate) with rocks we found in the yard and set it in the log before topping up with potting soil. I don’t really know what we were doing here, but fun is fun.
