Grass is always greener

Sod is awesome because it’s such an instant transformation. It’s Nature’s carpet! We laid down more sod in our backyard this week – the last major step in completing our landscaping. (I know better than to say anything is actually done -- of course, Mike is going to tinker with it some more around the edges!)

Rudy, who works for our landscaper, was putting down the sod with us. He’s a master of his craft, which is creating landscape edges. I’d never given that aspect of things much thought, but Rudy was so precise – it was inspiring to watch.

We had to clear a bunch of rocks out of the area where the sod would go. Mike had his pickaxe and was hacking away at the hard orange clay that passes for dirt in our yard. He had the legs of his jeans rolled up, and he was covered with dust. His comment: “I probably would have made a pretty good subsistence farmer.”

Stanley, of course, was fascinated with the whole process, because it involved fresh dirt, one of his favorite things.

We picked a house that didn’t require too much in the way of interior renovations (we’d had enough of that in Philly!), but the backyard was scrubby and not very usable. With backhoes, some new dirt, and a ton of rocks (or more, literally), our landscapers were able to transform it into a beautiful terraced area.

We were really lucky. Our landscapers are a father and son team who had just gone into business together. The father had been doing drainage work for years (the dirt part), and the son had just finished landscaping school (the plant part). Mike was the first person to come across their website.

We really enjoyed working with them, and in the process, we discovered that Mike may have missed his calling: he has a good sense for landscape design. Case in point: we had a landscape lighting guy out the other week, and he started setting up a bunch of spotlights. (“Dude, we are not selling used cars, and we’re not hosting the Stones concert! Tone it down!”) In the process, he was violating the one design rule that we’d learned from the previous landscape guy: you don’t want lights to shine in people’s eyes. But Mike plunged in and put a filter here, a path light there, and came up with something that worked.