Spring is a time for lovers...and landscaping

For those of you who may be wondering if our vacation was the ticket to pregnancy, well, it wasn't, at least not for us. In the meantime, that other couple? Yeah, twins. Nice.

So, Dear Hubby and I have turned our attention to landscaping! You may remember back a bit to the weekend last fall when we laid the Old Man to rest. Let's just say that when we bought the house last summer, the landscaping left something to be desired. In addition, since Dear Hubby and I are card-carrying environmentalists, having great swaths of turf needing constant watering goes against our basic moral principles.

Our stated desire was and is to install a low- to no-water-use landscape, minimizing turf area and maximizing use of native plants. After many phone calls to all the "Landscapers" in the Yellow Pages met with little success ("Well, miss, we mostly make our money installing sprinkler systems, so we're really not interested in a project like this.") we happened upon a young women newly hired by our local plant nursery. Fresh from Wisconsin, the land of milk and honey according to Dear Hubby, and with a degree in landscape architecture, she has been renamed "the Plant Goddess."

We made an appointment to meet with her to discuss our little project. That is if you can call a 1/4 acre landscape renovation a "little project." A dinner meeting and a few measurements later, she handed us a complete landscape plan, drawn to scale with all the plant details, such as what, where, and how many. It was nifty! Or is that neat? Apparently this is a Wisconsinism. Actually, the plan is super cool. Which may be a New Mexicoism, or maybe an Oklahomaism. Regardless, you get my point. And all it cost us was our promise to spend at least $250 at her place of employment, not hard considering our first outlay was for two trees for the front yard.

Dear Hubby and I never venture far into the yard without The Plan in hand. We've spent the better part of March digging and shoveling, planting and pruning. Ah, nature. It's truly a spiritual experience. And all the neighbors are jealous. Or at least, all the wives are jealous and all the husbands are being henpecked to get out in their yards and get busy.