A Dirty Hoe In My Garden

I have not done a very good job at documenting the progress on our home remodel.  We have everything in pictures, but I have been horrible about putting it in my blog. For me, it's really hard to take the time to write something when I am right in the middle of it.  Now I find we are almost done with the exception of one thing - the backyard.  That remains pretty much untouched.

Our backyard is not very large as you can see from the picture, but it's a pretty good size for the city.  We have a nice lemon tree that gives fruit all year long, an apple tree and several rose bushes. All horribly overgrown. A lot of the garden is paved and there are beds surrounding the perimeter.  The beds are filled with weeds and spiders.  Lots of both.  I don't like weeds. I am terrified of spiders.

A few weeks ago I decided to go tackle the garden and pulled about three feet of weeds while dodging hundreds of little spiders. It took me six hours. This was certainly not as fun as cleaning up our little front yard!  I really want to garden, but pruning the trees and pulling all those weeds is rather daunting.  Then I had a eureka moment.  Why not have someone else do that part?  I should probably call this a "duh" moment.  Why I didn't think of this before?!  I went to Yelp and starting looking for gardeners.  The one that caught my eye?  Dirty Hoe Landscaping.  The name alone was almost enough, but after reading the reviews and checking out the website I decided to email them.  The owner, Bernie, replied right away and we set up an appointment.

Yesterday Bernie came over and I liked him immediately. I have a really good feeling about him.  We looked around our yard and he asked us lots of questions about what we wanted for our backyard and gave us a lot of advice on what we could do.  We have decided to clear out everything with the exception of the trees and the rose bush on the gazebo. After that Bernie and his team is going to analyze our soil and do whatever they do to fix it.  Finally he will give us a list of plants he thinks would work well in our yard and we can either plant them ourselves or they can do it.  Perfect!  He said clearing out the yard should only take a day! Sure beats my pace and no spiders!!!

We get our quote early next week, but I am pretty sure we are going with Dirty Hoe. With a name like that how can we resist?