Spring is coming!

Hey - looks like I have survived the great floods of 2010 to see yet another spring!  Never mind that the front yard still looks like a lake.  I can tell spring is coming because the seed and plant catalogs have begun to arrive in the mail this week!   I LOVE those things.  Not sure I can convince Mark to try landscaping again just yet, though.  At least not until the barn and pasture fencing are complete, anyway.  But that's okay -- I'll just enjoy perusing the catalogs in anticipation of EVENTUALLY planting some more stuff. 

We did a lot of work on the front yard a few years back - 2005, I think.  These were taken as we were beginning the plantings.  It was still early spring then.

This one was before we did the plantings, but it shows all the trees we USED to have in front of the house.  All gone but two now, and those have been cut back significantly, as well.

And the plantings were all for naught once Gustav came through in 2008.  We not only lost most of those mature trees along the front of the house, but all of the azaleas and other flowering bushes we had planted out there.  It looks particularly barren in the winter now. 

We did plant a half dozen Magnolia trees across the front of the property out near the road because we wanted to have some minimal screen from traffic, but this time not so close that they could fall on the house in a storm.  But we haven't done anything else since the hurricane.  We haven't even removed the huge piles of wood chips that resulted from all those stumps being ground down.  It was pretty demoralizing to have spent all that time and effort (and money) before, only to have it all just disappear.  But maybe once everything greens up this spring we'll be motivated again.

We want to put up one of those white horse fences (which should do a lot for the appearance of the place in and of itself, I think), so once that's done, maybe we can do some plantings along the fence line.

We decided to use that Centaur fencing because although it LOOKS like regular 4-rail horse fence from a short distance away, it actually has electric wires running through it so the horses don't chew or lean on it, and so other animals (like stray dogs) won't come through it and harrass the horses.  

I'm really looking forward to getting it put up, but before we can have that done, we have to wait for the ground to dry out a little so we can finish getting the place graded now that the barn is in place.  Sigh.  It feels like we've been working on getting our horses home for YEARS now.  But before you can do one thing, you need to do another.  And that can't be done until something ELSE is done, and . . . well , you get the picture.

You know -- I think I bought one of those landscaping software programs just before Gustav.  I think I'll try and find the thing and play around with some ideas . . .just for the heck of it.   (I can just hear  Mark going "Oh, no!  More stuff for my 'list!' ")