Yup, we’ve been digging. And my arms are sore. But they don’t look like Madonnas yet so it couldn’t have been that bad. We still have a ton of things to do outside, so this is one of those it’ll-take-years-things, and not a ta-da-here’s-the-after-by-the-end-of-the-post things, but it’s nice to focus on one small area at a time to keep from getting overwhelmed (last year we limbed up the magnolia, transplanted/removed a lot of the bushes, and painted the front door). And for this installment of Petersiks Vs. Wild, we tackled the sad little garden bed to the right of the front porch: If you look closely, you’ll see what looks like a rectangular brick patio

It looked sweet when we finished it last year, especially if you ignored the fact that we had lots of landscaping stuff to attend to behind it. But these days it’s looking more like this: That’s a whole lotta ugly going on. The patio itself still looks great (and is weed free thanks to this step, while our un-polymeric-sanded cobblestone driveway is covered with them), but the “garden” area behind the patio has never looked worse. We even learned from the Katherine (the certified landscape designer who recently came over) that some of the trees were diseased and dying (which we actually heard from the previous owners as well but didn’t want to believe) along with