Muddy Mahem!

So....there is clearly a reason people hire professional landscapers. Up until this weekend, we didn't know what that reason was, because we consider ourselves to be amateur landscapers. Very amateur. We are constantly building walls, moving dirt, adding plants, moving plants, killing plants, you get the idea.

Over the weekend, we started here:


...transferring plants around our yard to better suit their sun/lackthereof needs. We fixed this area too: And this one (turns out my beloved hydrangeas don't do so well in 12+ hours of 100 degree hit and direct sun):

Oh, and we uprooted the rhododendrons here and moved them to the backyard, replacing them with much more colorful (and hopefully tougher) plants.

So you would think the 12 hours of labor, 3 trips to home depot and 2 people it took to do all the above would have been enough for one weekend. You'd be wrong. We also decided to dig up this little area to add some interest... ...and absorb a bit of extra water.

Due to the slight water problem we decided to avoid a rotor-tiller, and instead overturn all of the soil ourselves.

That was a bad idea.

It just kept getting wetter and wetter and wetter...



Until the plants we were trying to relocate started to float. Something about a sump-pump drain.

Well, after much effort, we finally finished:

And when you can't see the standing water, it looks ok. But...we've still not settled the mounds of muddy mayhem quandary.

Maybe we'll figure that out next weekend.