Staining Party!

Our backyard is looking beautiful, folks! This past weekend Matt and I resolved to get the fence and the deck stained so that we could move on to other projects. After a day of plugging away at it on our own Matt’s parents came to our rescue. Between the four of us we got the job done in about a day and still had time for a birthday picnic for Matt’s mum!

It's amazing what a difference the stain can make. Our deck looks almost brand new! Just for comparison, here is a picture of our deck before we started staining, and here is a picture afterwards. The dog remains the same for comparison purposes.

The yard is, overall, looking great. Dandelions have been pulled, gardens planned, soil sifted, and the lawn has had its first few mows. The apple trees are in bloom and my mason bees are pollinating their little hearts out, which means that our juicer will be providing us with plenty of apple juice in the fall.

Also this past weekend, we went to a native plant sale held at the Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary in town. There were tons of interesting plants, but the highlights of our purchases include a vine maple, a saskatoonberry bush, a flowering red currant, some wild strawberries and wild bleeding heart, and a few other small plants to fill in gaps around the garden. Hopefully because they're native to the area they’ll be able to withstand both dry spells and deer without too much fuss on our part.

I think the challenge this summer is going to be keeping up with our gardening plans. We have such a long list of changes that we want to implement, and only so much spare time to do it in. I’m going to take a bunch of “before” pictures so that even if we don’t achieve all of our goals this summer, we can still look at the photos at the end of the season and be proud of what we have accomplished.


Filed under: garden, life