Backyard Living

I need everyone of you reading this to submit my name to the magazine "Backyard Living" so that maybe they could come and rescue me with a yard makeover!! Most of you know that I love to garden and let me tell you about the garden I dream about having here. It seems in Hawaii, everyone has the most exotic and tropical gardens and perfect backyards with beautiful grass, toys, patio furniture, and palm tress. Well, it hasn't been so with us. I am posting this so that I can laugh at our misery a little, and that hopefully in the future there will be a blog about my beautiful garden and backyard and you will know how far we came!

Here is a picture of "my" garden. There was nothing there before. I dug it up, placed the stones, filled with soil, and planted. But instead of spending a fortune on plants and flowers, I dug up the gardens of houses that our scheduled to be torn down and moved them to "my" garden. Boy did it look good on the first day! Now it looks like this and everyday looks worse. My dad assures me they are traumatized, that the leaves will fall off, and it will bloom again. But I am still pretty discouraged. I worked from 9am-4pm on this one day last week and couldn't move the next 2 days! I am not a very patient person and want my instant beautiful garden. But I have to wait, and wait we will.

Here is our backyard...Joel's project since returning from Korea. The grass was dead when we moved in. We were told "water it and it will come back"..it was not coming back. Maybe we aren't patient enough, I don't know, but we raked up all the dead grass and turned the yard into a mud pit. We then through down full sun seed and watered and watered. And the birds came and they came. Our yard was literally covered in birds! So after a little research, we learned the best thing to do was dig up another person's yard (again houses that are being torn down) and sod it into our own. So here is where we are at. All the toys are loaded onto the patio, the yard is a mud pit with patches of sod, and the kids can't play back there for who knows how long!

So you see, not what I expected in Hawaii. I hope you can laugh with me and pray for our success! Any lawn and garden advice out there?