Even the best-laid plans...

...can turn into a pile of meaningless trash in an instant.

What we started.

Over the weekend, we learned that we won't be able to landscape the yard the way we had wanted to. The city has a nice list of rules regarding how yard landscaping must look, and even though not all homes in our neighborhood adhere to these rules exactly, we have been targeted by the city because we've lived here a year and by law must have a landscaped front yard by the end of the month. And they are telling us how to do it.

The front yard must be mostly vegetation...what they really mean is they want grass. Oh, grass...just what I was hoping to avoid. I'd dreamed of xeriscaping most of the front yard--perhaps even all. A landscaper came to look at the yard, and he said that the easiest way to quickly satiate the city is to put in a bunch of grass. And so, the front yard that I wanted to be mostly rock and bark will now be about 80% grass.

The landscaper claimed that grass was the best choice as far as saving time on yardwork goes. He may be right, in some ways. But I was completely willing to work a little harder to have what I had dreamed of.

I guess that part of the back yard will still be left for us to create as we wish, but not until after the landscapers scrape away about 6 inches of dirt and rock and replace it with topsoil, effectively erasing all the plans and outlining we'd started. Our garden will be uprooted. I'm not even sure when I'll get to plant my seed starts at this point.

So our plans aren't totally worthless, but right now it feels that way. Like all the stuff we were willing to do doesn't matter. And I guess we'd better get used to the idea of mowing a lawn Every. Damn. Week. All. Summer.

So a lot of stuff is on hold right now, and gardening might not be a reality until June. I'm hoping that I can still make a lot of my projects work out despite the setback.