Lizzie "after" and our yard "before"

Last week Lizzie began losing her hair in huge tufts.  It all came out by the roots leaving her completely bald.  It scared me to death.  But when Zoilo came over to trim their feet, he said that it wasn't really a problem.  He told me he had had horses in the past who instead of just "shedding" in the spring, lost all their hair, then grew it back in, and that he thought that's all Lizzie was doing.

Well -- turns out he was right.  At this point she has new hair all over.  It's not very long yet, but it's nice and soft and shiny.

The picture below is a little blurry, but in it you can see how "dappled" she's looking these days.   

What a relief! 

Tomorrow Mark and Jerry are going to cut back all those huge bushes and things on the side of the house so Mark can plant his fruit trees and vegetable garden over there.  So here are the "before" pictures.

This is the small "dog yard" that now contains only the air conditioners and the generator.  We're going to put raised planter beds in there for a vegetable garden so that neither the dogs nor the horses can get to them!

But first, we need to cut down all those huge bushes and trees so the sun can get in there all day long.

We also need room to be able to drive down that side to get to the storage building in back.  There's barely enough room for that at this point, as you can see above.

 But looking at the area from the back, you can see that if we cut down some of those huge bushes it will add a good 20 feet or more to the width of that space -- plenty of room to drive through there AND to plant fruit trees along the fence.  (And no, that tree in the front that you can see above the roof is NOT a dead tree.  It's just a pecan tree.  They don't leaf out until extremely late in the spring.)  Then the gate that will separate the back pasture from the front will run from that large end post on the fence that separates the new back dog yard from that old one with the A/C's in it over to just behind that light pole on the right above.

Okay, maybe it's not all that clear what I'm talking about.  But tomorrow after they remove the plants I'll take some more photos.   You'll see . . . it's going to look MUCH better!

Wish we'd planted all those giant bushes in the back along the property line!  Talk about plenty of privacy!  Well, maybe not a good idea, come to think of it . . . the darned things are so wide there wouldn't be room for a riding path back there if we'd done that. 

Can't wait to see this tomorrow!