Backyard blues

After our couple of days away over the weekend, we spent some family time yesterday afternoon in the garden. We’ve got one of the council’s big blue bins at the moment so we were pulling all kinds of things out of the ground to fill it up. All those cute little shrubs that used to look so nice when a mate of mine helped us renovate the back yard many years ago have grown into huge stick creatures and died.

We would love to have a shady backyard with waterfalls and cute little hidden areas like on all those TV shows but our collective gardening skills don’t add up to much at all. We wouldn’t even mind a simple, neat, functional back yard. We’re pretty good at letting plants grow out of control and then die but keeping the yard looking the way it should do is just beyond me. I hope that the gardening / handyman gene has simply skipped a generation and that James will grow up to be able to take care of the yard.

I think at times I should just brick pave the entire yard. If only I knew how to lay brick paving.

Posted by Rodney Olsen



Do you think some of your friends would enjoy reading Backyard blues? Please use the buttons below to share the post. Thanks.

About the author

Rodney Olsen

Rodney is a husband, father, cyclist, blogger and podcaster from Perth Western Australia.

He has worked in radio at Perth's media ministry Sonshine for over 25 years and has previously worked at ministries such as Compassion Australia and Bible Society.

The views he expresses here are his own.

View all posts

4 Comments

  • I’m with you on the gardening thing. As much as I try, I have to face the truth that I’m no good at it and I don’t like it.

    Of course, my punishment for this is to own a house that has a garden that requires constant maintenance…

    Oh for some slabs of concrete!

  • I can do you a trade Andrew. I’ll come and work over at your place for a day and we can display our incompetence together, then we do the same at my place. 🙂

    At least we could both look at gardening implements together and wonder what their correct purpose might be.

  • That makes three takers for this idea! I too, like Andrew, am absolutely useless are gardening. In some strange twist of punishment, my wonderful wife chose a house with a large yard, lawns to mow, and of all things: a swimming pool! (even though we are only minutes from the beach). Anyway, although the yard has been wonderful for when Rodney et al have visited (at least to keep Emily & James occupied). Paving sounds like heaven but the Grin would never allow it because (quote) “the weeds might poke through…” 🙂

Join the conversation

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.