On the side of our yard facing 54th Street, we have a long line of slowly-dying evergreen bushes (a disease claims one every couple of years), and a steep embankment along the fence that was filled with mulch and landscape fabric years ago and left to grow weeds. It’s horribly ugly and I never have a clue what to do with it, because it’s so steep and would take a huge effort and a lot of money to make it nice. Pulling it all out and planting grass isn’t even an option because there would be no way to get the mower up the 2 foot wall to cut it.
If I owned this house, I would totally make the effort to redo it. But we’re renters, so my work is mainly focused on the stuff we see and use regularly: our backyard, especially the vegetable garden. Our only motivation to do anything about the weedy embankment on the side of the house is that by mid-June it becomes really incredibly unsightly.
So today we set to pulling weeds and filled four giant lawn bags with them. While we were doing this, I was again lamenting that there was no relatively easy and cheap solution to making the landscaping look nice, much like the house behind us had done a couple of years ago. They planted a metric ton of daylilies along 54th, and they look really good. Just then, a guy came walking up and told us that they were putting in pavers, and were pulling out the entire garden. He felt bad letting all those plants go to waste, and did we want them?
So, yeah, that problem is solved. We’ll have a ton of work to do, but that’s hundreds of dollars worth of plants that just magically appeared.