Cabin Fever

This is what the backyard looked like when we moved in. The fenced in courtyard area with a little flower bed in front of it and all the overgrown bushes in the center of the backyard, split it up horribly.

Taking all this stuff out was one of the first things we wanted to do but then we found out I had to have surgery so it was not as much a priority as getting a bedroom finished so I would have some place to recuperate. We'd just have to live it with it until spring or so we thought.

It doesn't look so bad in this picture but looking at it from the house was a differnt story. It looked like an overgrown jungle.


My surgery wound up being more extensive than expected and my recovery period went from 6 weeks to 12 weeks. Fall came and went and winter reared it's ugly head. Once I got a little strength back, we would take daily walks to the barn and back. It seemed like miles the first few times. As we'd pass all this overgrown nonsense, it would drive me crazy. I guess I can be a little obsessive/compulsive and with all that was going on with my body, I would obsess on some things for days or weeks. There was a brief obsession with McDonald's french fries but luckily, it didn't last too long.

I just couldn't bear this view from the porch but there was little I could do about it at the time. Luckily, West Virginia has strange winters. It can be 15F today and 65F tomorrow. So somewhere between the first snow and the last, we had some really nice weather. We both prefer to be outside on any given day of the week so when the weather broke and we could get outside, we were both ready.

Taking the fence apart was easy enough. Taking out some of the posts was even relatively easy. Others... not so much. They were set in cement about 18 inches down. Not just a little cement. These people were fairly certain that using a lot of REALLY BIG nails and a lot of cement could hold together what they lacked in construction skills.

I am still recovering from surgery and was truly not much help other than taking the screws out of the fence and taking it down. Trace was stuck digging around the cement posts to try to loosen them. Once they were loosened, they were heavy! We still couldn't get them out so I went to the garage and brought our ATV over and would gently ram the posts until they either broke off above ground level or we could rock them loose enough to pull them out. Then we'd tie a rope around them and pull them with the ATV. There was one moment of terror on the first post when it unexpectly broke and I nearly ran over Trace with the ATV. Ooooopsie!

On to the bushes. Being that we would need to mow around the stumps, we decided to try to take them out by the roots. Trace dug around them and then we'd tie a rope around them and pull with the ATV. Then she'd dig a little more and we'd pull a little more. On and on this went. The tallest one took forever to get out. We were about to give up when it finally pulled free and landed on top of me as I was pulling it out. All I hear behind me as I'm scooting up closer to the handlebars is, "Keep driving... Keep driving..." Never mind that I'm being poked and stabbed by this thing just "keep driving."
Two days later, we were back to several inches of snow but my daily walks to the barn and around the property by this time, were much more pleasant because all that riff raff was gone.

It took two years of digging up all the overgrown flowers that were in the flowerbed where the fence was. There were millions of lilies growing in there. They were so tightly packed that they didn't even bloom.

We were giving away lillies to anyone who would take them. The neighbors.. my family.. planting them in other spots like along the driveway and beside the garage. We even through some on the ground behind the storage building and before we had another bonfire, they were blooming without even being planted. Lillies are hardy plants.

The backyard looks much cleaner now. We transplanted a few of the younger trees that were planted along the fence and planted grass and you can't even tell now that the fence or the flowers were ever there.

Unfortunately, the summer of 2007 brought with it a severe drought so the grass doesn't looks so good in the last picture but it was nice last summer.