Matt and I are not natural gardeners. Unless you count parsley. I have a garden box that is overgrown with parsley.

Fun fact: While Matt isn't a natural gardener, he's a natural flower arranger. It runs in his genes. Hand him a bunch of flowers, and he'll put a beautiful arrangement together.

Me? I just stick them haphazardly all over the place with no rhyme or reason.

So when a young couple with no ability to work the land buys a home with a huge front yard and a huge back yard, they're left with an overwhelming amount of work and no clue where to begin.

We've had a lot of set backs and some success. It's a learning process really. The yard can be such a source of inspiration for creativity and we're really excited about the plans we have for it.

We just need to learn to keep the right things alive and keep the wrong things out.

We've had some successes this year such as:

moving our rose bushes to get better sunlight
planting a peach tree and eating homegrown peaches
designing a colorful all-shade flower bed

But we've had a lot of failures such as

waking up to a finding a single bite taken out of every bean we grew
harvesting 0 tomatoes out of the three we planted
underestimating the power of kudzu

Kudzu. Every southerner's worst nightmare. Pictured below is some dead kudzu. A vine that literally grew from our back yard to our front yard in about a week. This stuff is crazy and it takes over everything, and we hate it. As we hate most of the wild vines growing in the back yard.

They're choking the trees and give our yard that jungle crazed look.

So this winter, our back yard to-do list looks like this:

prepare raised beds for the spring (we just did this on Saturday! Yay!)
clear out the vines growing over the fences
prepare ground for wild flowers
fix our fire pit area (the area around it is a pile of rocks...we want a smooth surface)

Because I'm really tired of looking at this:

The good news is that Matt has cleared out a lot of the vines suffocating some of the old pine trees, but we still have a long way to go.

// QUESTIONS

Are you working on any yard or garden maintenance this winter?

Journal

Trial & Error: Tending to our Southeastern Yard & Garden