Why I Oughta...

Early last Spring, we found a couple of super cheap trees at Wal-Mart.  Now...Wal-Mart isn't exactly the first place you'd think of when buying trees to plant in your yard.  In fact, we didn't go to Wal-Mart that day looking for trees.  But...somehow we ended up wandering into the nursery/outdoor part of the store and we stumbled on some trees. They were small, and a little scrawny but they were cheap.  They were $5.00 USD per tree.  Seriously.  We bought a few different kinds of trees - 4 in total.  We figured, we couldn't go wrong.  We only had our little Honda Accord, but we threw them in - and had them hanging out the trunk. We put one in our front yard - a Cleveland Pear Tree - and hoped for the best.  It was billed as "fast growing" and "flowering".  Last year it did very little.  In fact, I thought it "shrunk" a bit (I know it didn't....but due to it's small size, it felt like it did!). After the winter, we **hoped** t

I've chronicled our quest to build a garage (we have finished drawings!  and topography surveys!), but there are a few other companion projects going on at the same time.  We currently have a VERY ratty chainlink fence circling our backyard.  When the garage is done, that will change.  I've been getting bids from various fence companies on this style of fence:  board on batten.  It will be 6 feet high! I took this picture at my sister's new house.  I'll post some photos when ours is going up.  I'm pretty excited to get the fence put up - almost as excited as the garage.  In my sister's yard, the fence looks great and has a very clean look to it.   You're probably wondering why it'll be 6 feet high.  No...we don't hate our neighbors.  They're actually very nice.  We just wanted something high - for privacy and to keep the coyotes out!  Srsly.

On Friday, we cut down two perfectly healthy, magnificent Blue Spruce trees in our backyard.  We pushed this day off for almost a year, but it finally came.  Based on the previous owner's recollection, the twin Spruces were planted sometime in the early 1970's.  For some reason, they planted them directly in the middle of the yard.  From our deck, the view looked liked this.  We had no yard because of them. They're both were perfectly healthy.  However, we needed to start clearing the yard for our garage.  For the past year, we've tried (probably more than we should have) to find a home for both of these trees.  First, we looked at Big Trees Inc - a company that specializes in finding mature trees and providing them to folks who want large trees immediately.  Big Trees Inc comes over, digs the whole tree out with the roots and all, scoops it on a truck and pays the tree "owner" a few bucks.  They then take that mature tree and sell it for thousands!  Sounds