The problem with having five acres of land, is the maintenance. We are only here usually two months out of the year, and in the ten months that we aren't here the landscaping gets a little out of hand. We came back to our house this year agreeing that our house was surrounded by a small jungle. A lot plants over grown, and definitely an overwhelming task ahead of us. This year we decided to make a real effort to clean up our property. Its been a struggle, since we haven't properly taken care of in in a couple of years. None of us necessarily have 'green thumbs', but we know the basics. For starters, there needed to be a definite de-weeding day. We started the clean up about two days ago, and its consisted of us battling against the weeds. We are mainly focusing on our courtyard this year, since we have a lot of great ideas to make it a lot more quaint and clean. So two days were dedicated to de-weeding, cutting, and pulling plants to clean up the area to start making our courtyard look like an actual courtyard. Here are some photos of what we have done over the course of a couple of days.
My sister and our family friend pulling out some weeds, making room for a garden bed.
Our friend from the U.S attacking the bushes by our front door.
We later had to attack the bushes with a chainsaw.
Aftermath of the chainsaw.
The final photo doesn't seem like we did much, but the entire right side of the courtyard was covered in weeds. We plan on getting fresh soil, and create beds so that we can plant lavender and other variety of plants. We also want to remove the grass, that can be seen on the left side of the photo, and replace it with gravel so it looks a lot cleaner. We also have to make sure no plants have grown into the stone walls of the house. This can be really damaging, because the walls loosen with the amount of roots pulling the stones apart. These past couple of days are only step one of what we have to do, but we still have several weeks left here to do everything! We still have to lay out gravel, and brighten up the new garden beds with some flowers. We will post photos of the garden before we leave France, to show you guys how we progressed. In the meantime check back tomorrow for another post!
