It was an absolutely beautiful day outside when I took that picture, so I took a few others around the house as well. We moved in here around mid-February, so our entire yard was dead and lifeless when we got here, not very pleasant. The last week or so in Milwaukee has been perfect early Spring weather though, so things are starting to come back to life. A few hard rains mixed in with mid-70s weather? That’s pretty ideal for April/May.

I love having a yard, so things growing again is extremely exciting to me. I grew up around my grandparents a lot, and my Grandpa was a role model of sorts for me, though I didn’t come to realize it until the last couple of years. His yard meant a lot to him, he was constantly out there tending to it, even when his health told him he shouldn’t have been. It drove him nuts if things weren’t being tended to, and when his health finally dropped enough to keep him bedridden, I found myself going out into the yard in his place and taking note of what needed to be fixed. None of those things ever happened because we had to sell the house when he died, but it was fairly eye opening. I loved having a yard that was, essentially, my own.

Now, I live in a duplex. The yard isn’t mine, not nearly, but it’s still cool to see it coming alive, and I was already taking notes of what I could clean up out there when it’s warm again.

There are a lot of pictures incoming, so for the sake of load times I’m going to put it all behind the link below. If you read my work over on WI, you know how this works. Just click the link and you’ll see the full post. If you’re already seeing the flower picture below, you probably followed a direct link to this post and you don’t need to worry about it. It only affects those reading this from the front page of the site.

I have no idea what kinds of flowers we have in the planters around the house. None at all. The landlord pointed out what he thought was a rose bush, but even he didn’t know what else was out there. Most of the plants out there are pure greenery right now, but there were a few little tulips (I think) mixed in with all of the green. These guys were totally surrounded by greenage, I had to push some stuff out of the way to make them at all visible for a good picture. They’re still pretty obscured. I’m pretty sure the other plants around going to choke them out, so I might end up asking the upstairs neighbors if any of this stuff belongs to them, or if they were here before they were. If they don’t care about these plants, I’m going to plant something else in there. Well, my mother will probably plant them. That’s sort of her thing.

I do not know what this is. It’s just a chaotic leafy mass, and there are more of these around the house. Will it grow something neat? It is a mystery! I don’t think they’re related to the tulips but they might be. Also in this picture, you can see the edging of the planters. The bricks have somehow sunk into the ground and they’re lower than the sidewalk. I do not think they can do their job crammed all the way down there. I should ask the landlord if I can do something about them. Bonus points if fixing the planters can get money taken off of the rent, but I have doubts about that. This guy seems like the sort of person that would rather keep our rent consistent and come out and do repairs himself. We’ll see. Eventually.

This here is just gross. Apparently nobody knew how to rake leaves last fall, so there’s just a huge filthy mass of half-decomposed leaves in front of the house. Again, there’s a bunch of chaotic bushes there that just look ugly, and they’re choking out another bunch of tulips, which is what I believe that yellow thing is. I’m just assuming they’re tulips by their shape, they might be something else. I’m not looking forward to cleaning this out. Maybe our neighbors will do it.

The grass is pretty nice, at least. The yard is sort of lumpy and uneven, but I suspect that’s just from getting a lot of traffic. That just ends up happening to yards that have children playing on them and all of that, so it’s not something I’m going to complain about. It’s green, it grows, and there are no glaring dead patches. I’m happy with it. I’m just hoping it isn’t Kentucky Blue, because my Grandpa had that at his house and it was a disaster. Kentucky Bluegrass, if you don’t know, is basically gross for lawns you want to show off. It’s very pretty grass, and it has high resistance to disease/bugs, and droughts don’t damage it as much. However, it’s meant for low traffic areas. My grandparents themselves had four kids (my mom, my aunt, and my uncles, duh) and they all had kids. After a family gathering (Fourth of July or whatever else) the lawn was totally hosed. Since our upstairs neighbors have a kid, our lawn will definitely have traffic. Please, please let our grass be somewhat resilient.

Again, the planter (which you can see on the right) isn’ t exactly holding the plants in because the edging isn’t high enough. Whatever, not a big deal. Again, no idea whatsoever what’s growing there. Also, yes, those are AC units. What up, central air. No, that dish there isn’t ours. I don’t think it’s our neighbors either, they use Time Warner just like we do. It’s probably a relic of the folk that lived here before we did.

And that’s my yard. I look forward to the weather being nice enough for me to actually tend to it.

On a completely unrelated note, I wanted to say thank you to someone while I remember. Michael (who seems to be a lover of frogs) left a comment on my post asking for Cooking Resources with a link to The Worldwide Gourmet. It’s not as comprehensive as I would like for a catch-all resource, but it really is an excellent jumping off point. It’s not a one stop shop by any means, but the information it has helps me figure out what I’m looking for to begin with. So thanks, Michael! The link has been a huge help.

If any of you want to see the full size versions of any of these pictures, they’re over in my gallery sub-site. Be warned, the full contents of that gallery are very not safe for work/sanity. That page is also a temporary thing, I’m going to try to incorporate galleries more seamlessly into my blog. For now, they’re there. Just… heed my warning. NSFW.