The weedy berm, month #1 (May 2013)

Naturally, having a weedy berm is very embarrassing. Embarrassing enough that it has been sitting here behind my bedroom window being weedy for eight years with little to nothing done to beat it into submission. Sadly, I had given up enough in the past two years to simply insist on keeping the bedroom blinds firmly shut so that I didn't have to look at the thing.

What all of the preamble essentially means: I have no true "Before" photos of the weedy berm. The photos below cannot possible begin to capture the horror that was the weedy berm. What I have done, in order to give you the remotest possibility of picturing it, is to download a photo of someone else's weedy berm to post here, for your reference. Keep in mind that my berm, while much smaller in square area more likely than not had 200-300% the weed volume captured by the photo. Did I mention that it was weedy?

Someone else's weedy berm: for your reference

The biggest problem with having a weedy berm behind your bedroom window is knowing there is a pond up in there somewhere, with plants and fish in it that you took the time and trouble to transplant from your last home to this one and have totally neglected since.

The next biggest problem is that your husband has finally gotten so done with the entire situation that he has threatened to bulldoze it all if you don't do something with "your precious pond" really, really soon. Translation: "Now".

Garden, month #1 (May 2013)

In my previous (and first!) post I wrote about our pond and its initial maintenance after eight years of almost total neglect.

Likewise the property here has been generally neglected. If you were not a horse or had stuff in the barn, you were pretty much neglected over the past eight years. We have almost eight acres with a house a barn and shed that we purchased in June 2005 in order to bring home our horse, Dax from the boarding stable.

Immediately after our arrival here we added several good riding horses:
Clyde a trail horse for Michael, Lucy a Pony Club pony for Grace, and Dodger a trail horse for Kane. Suddenly we had four horses not just one and two girls in Pony Club.

What happened next is five years flew by ... we lost Dodger to old age and then Lucy to cancer. My older daughter brought home a lovely thoroughbred cross for eventing and then my younger daughter brought home a large pony for dressage and a smaller pony for games. I brought home a finely bred Hungarian WB gelding for training in dressage and eventing. Finally we brought home the most wonderful rock star rescue pony ever, Junior, for Kane.

For eight years when we weren't cleaning the barn, cleaning tack, stacking hay or picking up manure around the paddocks and transporting it to the manure pile we were trailering to Pony Club events, riding, schooling, trail riding, showing and just generally enjoying being riders and barn owners. It was really fun.

But, boy, the poor property. I loved gardening when we lived in Des Plaines in 2000 to 2005. It was so pretty and we had probably 100 different species of plants. Here we had weeds, and thistles and dandelions and weeds. Tall weeds, short weeds, lanky weeds and mat-forming weeds.

Something needed to change and change it did. Spring 2013 came and both of my daughters were off to college. Kane's pony Junior has passed on from very old age. Things are loosening up around here and it's time to get back into the garden.

After a week off work the first week of May here is what I accomplished in our garden by the goldfish pond.

Little shade garden under the tree

Shade garden, notice weed infested berm

Agent, supervising

Cleaned out the garden shed

Cleaned the shed, bought tons of plants for garden