Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Hacking Through the Bush (es)

BF moved into a fabulous row house in Logan Circle nearly 4 years ago. It is a charming house broken up into 4 apartments. We believe that it was built sometime around turn of the century. It is old, quirky, needs some love but will soon be our first nest as a married couple.
Logan Circle is the coolest neighborhood in DC (declaration compliments of me). Most of the people on the block own their homes and take care of their postage stamp-size yards. Since we are renters the yard was lacking to say the least.

The weather in DC this past weekend was gorgeous with a capital G, perfect for "yard" work. I use the term "yard" loosely when referring to the patch of overgrown box hedges, trash cans, dead tulips and garbage that sit outside the front door. The sweet next door neighbor was exstatic that we were going to take care of the mess and even provided us all the tools that we needed.

BF put me in charge of the electric trimmer-saw thingy, which was way too much fun. I may or may not have been a little saw happy. As we began to chop the hedges down and reclaim the sidewalk we started to find treasures. Like a pair of Roos, remember those? We also found a disgusting rug, socks, milk jugs, super yucky trash and some of the weirdest bugs that I have ever had the displeasure of seeing.


Roos=cool Bizarro bug =yuck
We didn't realize how much people on our street hated the yard until we started to work. Folks were coming up left and right to shake our hands and jokingly ask us to take care of their bushes. There is a cool B and B across the street and the owner came out and invited us to a neighborhood mixer. In almost four years we have never even seen or met him before this moment! Our sweet neighbor next door said that he had not seen the front yard of the building cleaned up since the early 1950s! He even gave us tickets to the Nat's game Friday night as a neighborhood beautification appreciation prize. Now that is neighborly love.

We now realize that there actually is a yard under all the mess. We have cleared out all the garbage and growth, trimmed the hedges and are looking into doing a little planting.
Does anyone have any shade loving plant suggestions? Pictures of progress to follow.

2 comments:

Jason said...

Begonias.

Lauren said...

Thanks! We'll have to try those out.