Landscaping in the inner circle of hell...

When we bought our house, we knew not to expect much as afterall, it was a short sale. Add in living in desert conditions and you have the makings of a mind numbing project with a looming deadline because we're batshitcrazy and decided to make use of our 9000sqft lot.

Now of course looking at the picture which is just one corner of the yard, you can see our various problems - dead grass, overgrown plants, and pygmy palm trees that cut in the yard in half as there's one flanking each side of the firepit. This was taken the week we moved in... before summer really hit. 105 degree temperatures really just added to the issue. The previous owner never picked up after her dogs (it took R & two of his brothers two+ hours to pick up all of the dog crap!) and never did any sort of yard work. Most of the flowering plants stopped blooming, the trees were rotting, and what was blooming was major allergy triggers for R.

My solution? Burn it down... or tear it all out. We went with the latter for obvious reasons. I've been spending most of my late evenings when the sun is over the front yard and the breeze from the canyon is kicking up working back there. As of today, we're looking like this:

Clear view to the fence! No nasty, sharp pokey palm tree! Patches of green grass! We have six weeks to get this all together which includes: babying the rest of the grass (re-seeded for the second time last night), planting 20+ new fir pine trees for shade and privacy, re-staining the back fence, and building deck boxes.