Backyard Retreat, part 1

I didn’t walk through our backyard for the first year we owned the house. Seriously. Sometimes I tiptoed down the back steps but I didn’t really creep past that spot. It was just so overgrown and unknown out there in the jungle. Imagine Lord of the Flies…. now you get it. (yes the image below really was our backyard)

When we bought the house, it had all these crazy banana plants, which are invasive and take over any space where they start to grow. And they are tall. And they only last one season. So then that stalk dies, and they keep creeping outward like a bad RL Stine novel. But Matt felt like he had won the agricultural lottery. Free bananas in our yard! But they tasted terribly, and finally, Matt came around, and we called in the landscapers to give us estimates on tearing them out. One told us it was the largest bunch of bananas he had ever seen in New Orleans. I was briefly concerned that this may cause Matt to change his mind, but we marched forward.

544125_10101964967960484_1314084876_n — Matt proudly displaying the bananas like he spent the day hunting for game.

Apparently it took four men two entire work days to tear out our mess of a backyard and plant sod, but at the end of the first day, Matt dropped me a text with this here photo on the right. I was ~~floored~~ ~~thrilled~~ ecstatic. And then I went in our backyard for the first time.

Now Matt has adopted our backyard as his child. He has a flourishing garden, an automated sprinkler system for the lawn AND the garden, and we obtained two fruit trees which might produce fruit sometime before we move out of the house. My goal is just to get some string lights, a fan, a table and my custom cornhole game finished. This is almost perfectly representative of our personalities.

More to come when we finish!