Senior Moments

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I had an new project in our yard — the flower beds around two trees

Edger blocks used in one of our original flower beds.

and our lamp post needed to be replaced.  They were among our very first projects and although they worked quite well for a couple of years, they were starting to to fall apart.  The picture at the right shows what the bed around the lamp post looked like this year.

Fortunately we learned a few things in the time we’ve been landscaping our yard, so we knew that we could make better beds by using retaining wall blocks.  So we had to start a series of “Lowe’s Runs” to get the necessary materials.

I’m glad to report that building the new beds required more brawn than brains, and once I had the number of blocks needed for each layer, the beds went fairly easily.

Betsy and I finished the last flower bed Friday before we had all the excitement with Hurricane Ike.  Betsy and I are quite happy with the

The new bed around our lamp post.

way the new beds look.  You can judge for yourself — the picture below is of the new bed around the lamp post.

Edger blocks used in one of our original flower beds.

When Betsy and I first saw the place that is now our home, we fell in love with the house.  The yard was okay — the landscaping consisted primarily of grass in the yard and an overgrown rock garden.  That didn’t really bother us, since we would only be able to get to the house a couple of weekends a month.

We moved to the Glade in 2003, but since I was still working, we didn’t get to do much landscaping.  But by the spring of 2004 we were ready to begin some landscaping of our own.

One of our first projects was to build some circular flower beds around our lamp post  and two trees in our front yard.  We used edger blocks to build the beds as you can see in the picture above.  The edger blocks seemed to do the job and we were able to build the beds fairly easily and quickly.

Our next project was much bigger — to control erosion on the side of the house we built a long flower bed into the side of the hill.  For that project we used retaining wall blocks.  It took us over a year to finish that bed, but it was finally done and we were happy with the looks of the bed.

Our first rebuilt bed.

But now I have to go back to those original beds.  Over the past four years the edger blocks have spread apart and even fallen a time or two.  So now I’m in the process of replacing the edger blocks with retaining wall blocks in those three beds.  I’ve got one done, as you can see from this second picture.  Two more to go — I wonder will need to be done after that?