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We finally called a landscaper. She came by to look at the yard yesterday, she's going to fax a quote today, and most likely start work tomorrow. Her name is Peggy Evans and I like her a lot. I got her name from someone on the Internetworkers list (a great list for this kind of referral by the way), who had been impressed with the work she did on a house with an overgrown yard that needed to be sold.

There was some ribbing about the condition of the yard -- when she got out of her truck, almost her first words were "When you said it was a jungle, you weren't kidding!" but she was pretty cool about it. She's going to rip out all the overgrowth, cut everything back, and mulch, but not plant anything. At this point I couldn't even visualize the yard well enough to decide where things should be planted. Peggy said the work will be done by just 3 people: her, her husband, and their employee. And she thinks they can do the front yard in three days. Wow! Depending on the cost we might have her do just the front yard now, and then the back in a couple of months. But I'm really hoping we'll be able to do the whole thing right away. She even offered to throw in power washing the house and awnings for free.

I asked her about the bamboo in the back, which has invaded from the neighbor's yard. She said that she can pull it out, but it's going to be a problem forever. I remembered later that I'd heard you can stop bamboo by digging 3 feet down and putting in a metal wall underground. When she comes back I'll ask her if she thinks that would be worth doing, or if there's already too much of it on our side of the fence. I should have had that done when I first moved in. But then again, I was broke when I first moved in, so broke that renting the equipment and doing it myself (if I even could have) would have been a problem.

We walked around and I pointed out the things I want to keep. There's not much: in the front yard just 4 trees, the butterfly bush, and the perennial herbs. Other than that, she has carte blanche to remove anything she thinks should go. She said that while she was at it, she'd take whatever loose dirt they have from removing things and put it around the foundation, which has gotten low because the dogs like to lie there & they usually scratch at the soil to make it cooler.

Also I warned her about the bunnies, pointed out where they live and asked her to be careful not to hurt them. She said that her husband loved animals so much that if he saw them, he would probably want to catch them and keep them as pets.

Georg and I were talking about it last night and we realized where things went wrong: in 2001, the year we were working on the tarot deck. Before that the yard wasn't a showpiece or anything, but we kept up and even did some improvements: we had a vegetable garden, a nice herb garden, and I had planted blueberries and had been working on making a flower bed in front by the mailbox. But the deck took up so much time, and my job was more than 40 hours at the time. We totally abandoned all yard work for about 6 months. After that we never got caught up again, not even close, and to be honest I pretty much stopped trying and left Georg to deal with it by himself.

But we've finally admitted defeat and brought in someone who can get us to a place where we can (and will) keep up with it in the future. I'm so excited about having a real yard again.