After a while, you run out of excuses.

Sometime around the middle of July, we ran out of excuses for not starting on the yard projects we'd been planning. After one massive trip to Home Depot (the Internet is not big enough for a tally of everything we bought), we were ready to finish off the backyard fence and build a tree ring planter around the red maple in the front yard.

After we decided to actually do these projects and had a ton of landscape stone in the carport, we were resolute. Unfortunately, the next weekend to come up was 97 degrees and insanely humid. And it was the release date for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. But we're tough, right?

Now, the instructions for building a tree ring planter are very simple. You just need a level base that allows the bottom ring of landscaping stones to be buried about halfway. In real life, though, trees have roots, and roots are not level.

An impromptu call to Matt, Ellen's brother and forestry major, confirmed that sawing through the roots to make a level surface probably wasn't the best for the health of the tree. (See, Mom & Dad, our them there college edumacashuns is good for sumfin!)

We settled for making the base as level as possible and doing the best we could.



It took us a few weeks to bring home enough topsoil to fill up the planter (36 forty pound bags, for the record). We plan on planting impatiens or some other shade flower next summer, but for now we just topped it off with cedar chips.

The finished product isn't too shabby, even if it is more of a tree curvilinear planter than a tree ring planter. Because of the roots, it's not perfect, but it will hopefully allow the tree to survive.



While Ellen was hauling landscape stone and swearing at tree roots (which are not generally very responsive), Craig was in the hot sun finishing off the chain link fence for the backyard. As Ellen is writing this, there may be a lack of witty commentary about the process. My apologies.

Anyway, we have half-baked ideas about adding a deck that would encompass the side entry in a few years, so we elected not to mix and pour concrete for the fence posts. This doesn't make for the sturdiest fence in the world, but it keeps 13-pound Phoebe in nicely.



This way, she can run around the backyard without being on a leash or a long lead. Here, she's discovered some sort of mouse hole in the corner of our garage. She barked at this spot for quite a while, and was so intriuged that she even ignored Craig and the lawnmower passing five feet behind her.



It is a very basic fence, but it does the job. It also provide a nice solution to the problem of who mows what in the space between the two houses.