Cicada Killer Wasp Time

It's mid to late August and that means Cicada Killer Wasp season. They are probably the largest most intimidating flying insect you'll see in Tennessee but fortunately they are pretty much harmless. The males aggressively skirt around the yard investigating every flower and flying insect they can find, looking for females but are unable to sting. The larger females very rarely sting humans and are more interested in finding cicadas to take back to their in-ground nests to feed larva for over-winter. You'll sometimes catch them camping an outdoor light fixture at night waiting on a cicada to show up. I was quite terrified of the buggers a few years ago but after reading about them gained much respect for them and enjoy watching them this time of year. You can read more about them here.

Flower Beds – The Final Frontier

A blockbuster to be released this summer! Ok, the title is a bit dramatic, but we are seriously psyched to finally be done with all of our yard transformations for the year. After living in the house for over 7 years, and never having done more than mow and pull the occasional weed, it was time to get serious. Oh, and the three trees that came down and suddenly opened our house up to a street view probably helped to motivate us as well.

We saved the biggest project for last. We have a two-tier bed system in the back yard, where you step down from the first bed into the second one. The dimensions for the two beds together are 28 ft. by 14 ft. So we’re talking bout 392 sq feet of space here. I think the large size and the hodge-podge of various plants that the previous owner had installed served to sufficiently intimidate us for all these years. No more! After cutting our landscaping teeth on smaller beds in the front and back, we set out to tackle these last two a few weeks ago. Please note, all photos were taken with a sweaty iphone, and so are not the best quality.

The Before Pic

That dang ole tamper will get your wrists!

Since we have so much space, we decided to create a stone paver seating area in the lower bed, where we can put chairs or a bench so that we can enjoy sitting out in the garden. This really was the hardest part of the project, because the pavers are heavy and making sure they are all level on top of the sand is tricky. Then you sweep more sand into all the cracks and wet it so that it can solidify.

World's largest jigsaw puzzle

Brad's no stranger to a broom!

Oh, and check out Brad’s super sweet sweatband. *Cue The Eye of the Tiger*
For some reason, we did pick the hottest weekend of the summer for our most strenuous project.

Finished seating area

Woody loves the smell of fresh mulch in the morning

We then used the individual pavers to create a stepping stone path through the top bed down to the seating area.

We’re going to wait until the fall to install all of the plants. Our good friend and, lucky for us, Landscape Architect, William is drawing up some plans for us. He’s going to focus mostly on native plants, and plan them so that we have something blooming spring/summer/fall and some year round color as well. I can’t wait to get them in the ground! We did go ahead and plant two hibiscus plants and put a few day lilies on the tree stumps just to have a bit of color until the fall.

Jill approves

And then lastly, we created a new bed around an existing snowball bush by the deck steps. These broken rocks were fairly cheap castoffs at the landscaping place, so we thought they’d make a nice border. Still haven’t decided what we’re going to put in this bed, maybe annuals.

The final step for our outdoor transformation was the installation of some new outdoor speakers. Brad wired it so that we can easily hook an ipod up to them, paving the way for some fun outdoor shin-digs!