anyone else whose backyard is not magazine-perfect?

[Tuesday]

I'm getting a bit of an inferiority complex. We live in a 100 year old home with a small backyard. I am a complete newbie to gardening (grew up in a home in a forest and then apartments). We have lovely perennials and a weedy clover lawn. I grow some basil and lettuce and chard - just easy stuff. I don't really like gardening, to be truthful. I'm allergic to grass and trees and tend to feel ITCHY when outside.

Anywhoo, everywhere I turn, the neighbours (with kids) have picture-perfect backyards. Expensive play equipment, pristine lawns, lush vegetable gardens - everything perfect, new, clean and well-tended. My DH works about 60 hours a week too so he's not much help.

I wonder if there are other people whose backyards are just somewhere between unkempt and perfect? My kids seem happy. They are playing with worms right now ... couldn't be happier. I just peered over at the neighbour's yard with their expensive play equipment and felt like maybe my kids are shortchanged - they've got a tiny second hand pool and some pails and shovels and worms!

Thoughts?

[~Demeter~]

Hi! My yard isn't perfect! It's not totally unkempt and dangerous but it could use some help. I normally plant a veggie garden but didn't this year so that area has gone wild. The playset we have has some broken pieces and is looking rather weathered... I'm a bit too broke and rather pregnant at the moment to fix all of the things that need fixing and my husband isn't overly handy, so it waits. I doubt it will ever be magazine perfect though.. too many other things in my life that are calling my attention.

I feel your envy though. I truly wonder sometimes how other people do it.. and sometimes I wish I could have that, too.

[Tuesday]

Demeter - well, darn, you made me feel better. Lol. Good luck with your pregnancy - I was last pregnant this time 4 summers ago. We had just moved into the house and I had a neighbour always hanging over the fence asking me when I was going to pick the violets, pick the grapes, do this, do that. I was 9 months pregnant?! lol.

Back to the topic at hand - thanks again. My lack of money and many other interests and demands too seem to guide me away from making the yard look like the perfect child playground. I guess kids just want to have fun and be loved ... not have the latest playground equipment and flowers.

[Alyantavid]

Uh, yeah.

Our grass looks good, the garden and trees look good, but the fence is old and our cow is pushy so it's not pretty. Dh parked mil's pickup and trailer on the edge of the yard and he's in the process of remodeling his shop so everything that belongs in there is just piled outside right now.

I think I want one of those giant playsets more than my kids do. We have an old swing set now.

[mamadelbosque]

Hah, our yard is far from perfect. Its huge, but thats about the only thing its got going on. An old turtle sandbox, an ancient 'swing set' built by my dad (which is now basicly just a platform w/ a pole to slide down...), and lots of trees. And utterly neglected flower gardens & vegetable gardens. And a broken down wood pile thats in serious need of help/replenishing (we heat w/ wood...)

[rhiOrion]

My yard is definitely not picture perfect. We bought the house at the end of January, and I was super pregnant. Had the baby in April, and have been sort of busy since then

So, our yard is pretty in that there was already some landscaping. It looked pretty rough when we moved in, but once spring arrived the already-planted plants popped up. But our grass is threadbare in a lot of spots. Our apple trees are dropping apples everywhere that are totally rotting. But I have an infant, no time for apples. We have a rose bush that is threatening to take over our house. It's well over one story tall, and really might just claim our backyard as its own any day now.

[Catherine12]

Magazine-perfect? Only if the magazine is about exploring the wilderness...

Actually, we did mow *part* of it... and there's a veggie garden... otherwise, let's just call it a nature preserve (I'm providing an untouched natural habitat for all the birds and beasts! Like the woodchucks who ate half the veggies in the garden).

Worse thing? Front yard is even more, um, natural, than the back. Good thing we are in a rural area and not suburbia...

[Tuesday]

Heeehee. So glad I started the thread. Is there a disorder you can contract from looking at too many picture-perfect blogs? I think that is contributing to my issues with my yard. Kids are happy and the vegetables are growing and flowers are pretty - just no one would post the pictures in a blog.

[EFmom]

My back yard is absolutely magazine worthy, so there.

But the magazine would have to be Wasteland Weekly, Modern Junkyard or Scrubland Today.

We don't poison the yard, and have tons of weeds. I figure so long as they are green, I'm good with that. It gets mowed regularly, but dh doesn't edge anything, which makes me nuts. Right now, half the fence is down as he's putting up a new one over the summer, but it's a mess.

In lieu of a deck or nice patio, we have a cracked and crappy concrete pad, with weeds coming up in the cracks.

[Drummer's Wife]

EFmom.

We have 1/2 an acre of dirt, tumbleweeds, some rock and brick xeriscaping, cactuses, and lots of wild bunny rabbits running around in the backyard. It's definitely not magazine perfect. There are toys strewn around, the swingset is now mangled due to crazy winds and a leaking sprinkler systlem (sprinklers in the dessert where we don't have grass?) I can make it look nicer by tidying it up, and DH pulls weeds in the inner part of the yard often - but it's nothing pretty. I do try to spray off the cemented porch and picnic table if it gets dirty/sticky/paint on it, etc. but that's about it.

[Tuesday]

Originally Posted by EFmom

In lieu of a deck or nice patio, we have a cracked and crappy concrete pad, with weeds coming up in the cracks.

Yahoo! Hallelujah! lol. Thanks for your honesty. Me too, by the way.

[ledzepplon]

Ha! One of my requirements for a house is a backyard that's NOT magazine perfect. Of course I'd like some pretty spaces, but I have 3 (almost 4) active little kids who like nothing more than to dig and move dirt around the yard. So if everything was perfectly manicured, they'd be very bummed out.

[Drummer's Wife]

oh, that reminds me - all of my missing spoons and other random kitchen utensils can be found scattered throughout the backyard. Since it's almost all dirt, my kids love to turn the hose on and make mud - so there are holes and piles and 'roads' and such to be found.

[~savah~]

Not only is our back yard not perfect, but neither is our front yard. We have a doughboy pool back there with a deck that needed to be refinished two years ago. Our vegetable garden is probably 5% weeds. I think that as long as you are comfortable with your yard, that is all that matters.

[ada]

Our backyard is... fine. Just... fine. It's a plain expanse of green grass. We keep the grass healthy and trimmed, just like we do the front yard. I have a few flowerbeds in the front yard, but nothing in the backyard.

We've always meant to do something, anything but movie marathons or another visit to the "Dinosaur Museum" (what my six-year-old little brother calls it) kept winning out and now it's just too stinkin' hot.

[ChristyMarie]

Mine is bad.

From a distance it looks fine. But you get up close and realize all that greenery is weeds, not plants! DOH!

We couldn't afford to do mulch this year and the weeds have taken over. If I could grow plants like I can grow dandelions, man, I'd be quite the gardener.

THEN, to make it worse my husband tried to kill weeds, bought the wrong stuff and killed a lot of grass. No matter what we do we cannot get it to grow back.

I did do some pots of flowers that are doing great.

But we have an acre and a lot of flower beds and it is just a little overwhelming.

[HeatherAtHome]

Let's put it this way. When we decided to rent a garbage container I felt like this: . Yeah. It's main purpose is to get rid of drywall etc we're ripping out of the house but I plan on squeezing in some things from the backyard.

We bought the place last fall and since this spring we have been trying to fix up the backyard but there's just so much STUFF. Previous owner had laid down carpet (years ago) for pathways/mulching, had cheapo 'decorative' fencing all over the place (rusted and bent), and was a huge fan of garage sales. We inherited 4 nonworking weed wackers.

Things are tidier looking but now we have PILES of things to be dealt with. Pile of rocks, pile of old windows, pile of old wood, pile of old bricks from the chimney we knocked down... We have been here long enough for 2 Big Garbage days last fall, this spring) and just can't get rid of stuff fast enough!

[rere]

Originally Posted by Tuesday

Demeter - I was last pregnant this time 4 summers ago. We had just moved into the house and I had a neighbour always hanging over the fence asking me when I was going to pick the violets, pick the grapes, do this, do that. I was 9 months pregnant?! lol.

HA!When we moved into this house I was not pregnant but I had a 1.5 year old who wouldn't go in the grass and husband who had only ever moved twice in his entire life and was NOT helpful.I was trying to unpack the whole house by myself while helping my daughter (and my husband)adjust to the move and one day a neighbor asked me about when I was going to mow the grass.I ran down the list of things that I was trying to get done and then said"so,if you want to come over here and mow you just feel free.Anytime."Not another word out of the man.

Anyway...4 years later I have finally realized that unless you have a big bunch of money,it takes time.My yard is starting to have some things that I really love about it but they're not anything any magazine readers would want to see.

[ollyoxenfree]

We have the worst lawn and backyard for several blocks .

In our defense, we moved in during the middle of last summer and we are here renting temporarily. We thought we would have found a place to purchase by now, but for one reason and another, it looks like we will be here for another year.

We know that the landlord (or whomever he sells to) plans to knock down the house and rebuild, which is very common in this neighbourhood.

I cannot get interested in putting in hours of hard labour and lots of expense to weed, rebuild, plant etc., when I know it won't last.

So, yeah, I'm doing my best to ignore the yard, and the comments of the neighbours. We are surrounded by retirees who spend hours on their lawns, meticulously weeding and grooming them. In the fall, it was quite amusing - I thought they must have alarms wired to their yards - to let them know when a stray leaf fell, so that they could grab it as soon as it hit the grass .

[jocelyndale]

When we bought our house a bit over five years ago, DH picked up fallen wood/logs and ringed off a 10' diameter circle just to see what would happen.

Other than occasional mowing, we do very little with the back yard. It's not picture perfect, unless your picture is of a meadow being reclaimed by woods.