We know that Romans 8 tells us we are more than conquerors, but this weekend, I felt like more than a conqueror-we took control of the yard! We pulled out the weeds, we trimmed back the offending growth and we planted flowers, vegetables and seeds of various kinds! It was awesome!
The day started like many others, with me looking at this:

and thinking, “this tea rose is out of control. We really need to do something about it.”

So we did (and yes, we know we should have been wearing things like actual shoes and not flippy floppers or pants rather than shorts but I really didn’t intend to do more than cut a few branches while killing some time):

and we were left with this:

A whole new view…of sorts.

The tea rose was reduced to rubble….. Now if only we could burn slash piles in Redmond:

 It’s going to be a bit of an ugly year for that corner of the yard, but I’m confident that the tea rose will make a strong comeback next year. The problem was that once we started trimming, there were only dead, brown sticks under the leaves and they had to go too. We’ll just call it an opportunity for growth.

And a big THANK YOU to April and Carrie who gave us a Molbak’s giftcard! Here we are with our bounty- we got some tomato plants, some lettuce, a pepper plant, a whole flat of petunias and a rose and a pot and some other stuff too! (thanks for taking the photo, mom) It was pretty fun!

Then we went home and Erik prepped the soil so we could have our little vegetable garden:

Come by in about six weeks and we can give you some fresh veggies!