aka, how I thru out my back, worked through the pain and learned something new
My wife and I recently (within the last year) bought our first home. It came with more yard then we expected and we’ve never been in a positing where we needed to tend a yard so gardening is quite a new experience.
Mowing was the first step and I think I’m getting the hang of that. We’ve got about an acre so a rider is a must but we are getting it done, mostly.
Next step was dead bushes along the front of the house. We ended up needing someone to pull them them out and plant the new ones. We gave it a shot but the bushes were lodged in the ground quite well. We tried the ol’ tie-a-rope-to-the-dead-stump-and-the-other-end-to-your-car trick but that ended up with thick logs flying out of the ground and slamming into the car. Which isn’t what we wanted (no vehicles injured in the process, thankfully).
My wife was a bit overwhelmed with the process of new gardening work at this point so I decided to jump in and add some rose bushes while she was away on a work trip. We’ve had a dead tree stump in our front yard since moving in (see above); it’s too thick to cut with chainsaws we have access to and getting it professionally removed is very expensive so I decided to turn it into a feature by making a flowerbed around it full of the aforementioned rose bushes.
The process started with creating space for the flowerbed by getting rid of the grass. This was hard manual work that had the unfortunate side effect of straining my lower back on day one. This meant pain and a lack of mobility, unfortunately. But, I wanted to press on so I dug and my 8 yo got done and pulled up the patches to cart off for composting.
Digging was tricky because of the thick roots near the stump so I aimed to get as much of the grass out as I could. Once that happened, I took the weed eater to what was left, put some cardboard over the grass and then topsoil on top of that. After talking to a pro - they thought this would be best to create some good soil for planting near the stump next season (hopefully).
We got 6 drift rose bushes - 3 red and 3 pink - to plant in the outer ring, in an alternating pattern. For that I needed to dig a bit deeper holes for the bushes first. At this point my wife was back to help with the work that required bending so I dug and she placed the bush in the hole and then secured it in with some good quality, nutrient-rich soil. We then mixed existing soil with the nutrient-rich soil to fill in the “moat” and then covered everything in some mulch to complete the look. I’m really excited with how it turned out! It feels really nice to have put my blood, sweat and tears into a project like this and makes me think we can do more in the future! You can see the final result above!