It's catching!

My neighbors just tore out their cement slab, too!

Their yard fared a lot better than ours, though. You can't even tell a bobcat came through their front yard. Lucky jerks.

I am so traumatized.

Remember this?

 

We had a guy from craigslist come and do this. Listen for when I tell him to "watch the peonies, brother."

Removing the concrete slab from ChuckT on Vimeo.

Everything looked so good at first. He was removing big chunks of concrete without disturbing the plants around the slab. I mean, check this out:

Unfortunately, the lawn looked like this. And he dropped a piece of concrete on one of the bloodgood maples on the parking strip.

Our front yard looks BUSTED. I don't even want to post photos. It was incredibly stressful watching him barely skim past the side of my house, over and over. He started dropping pieces and I started worrying he would take out my chimney. Remember your mantra when hiring people: "Are you licensed and bonded?"

I have no idea if he was licensed and bonded because I FORGOT TO ASK.

But now my yard, my beautiful yard, looked like this. It was traumatizing. I felt like someone had raped and pillaged my happy place.

Greg and I got up the next morning to start moving the raised beds (I swear I'll post The Plan soon) and Greg discovered that my Oregon Iris is about to bloom for the first time since I planted it 18 months ago.

And I swooned and I was happy again. Luckily, nature is good at recovering. We are both trying to remember that. I was shocked at how viscerally I reacted to seeing my yard torn up; I was even more shocked that Greg was upset too. So last night after dinner with his family he thatched and reseeded the lawn in the dwindling light. I took photos of parts of the yard that are still pretty.

The good news is that I can see the plan coming together now. We dismantled the dog bone and reassembled it where the cement slab used to be. Our shape inspiration was two wine glasses (the stemless kind).

 

It the corner behind the wine glasses we're going to put in a Colorado spruce. This will give us some height in that corner and something green to look at in the winter. We're gaining more planting space in front of that and I'll need to really work on getting stuff that's evergreen. And of course I'll need to finally yank the weird mystery willow. 

So yeah, short evergreen plant suggestions . . . GO!

Cedar bark is being delivered so we can lay down pathways before everything turns to weeds. Then the boy and I can get down to the sweet business of arm wrestling over who gets to choose what kind of hippie lawn to plant on the old dogbone space. I want something flowering and low water; he wants something that looks like a traditional lawn.

Of course, he rescued me from a LOT of garden spiders this weekend (new and interesting ones that were SO scary!) and he removed the biggest slug I have ever seen, so I'll probably let him have his way.

He's all curled up here--he was HUGE