The fun is over, now what?

Well, we finished the landscape job this weekend, more or less. There is still a Japanese maple to plant and some patio pavers that are rocking a bit that need to be shored up with some more sand.

But other than that, we're in business.

Oh, and a swing set for Cooper.

My wife, Stacey, helped a lot, and I hope she really thinks it's worth it in the end. She carried 64, 16-inch paving stones to the back to be laid for the patio and also helped me level out and dig in the large flagstones leading up to the patio.

Mommy and Cooper taking a break on the patio

Everything came together really quickly at the end, although there were a few blips.

A nifty auger tool that fits on a drill I ordered from Amazon that was going to help dig the 500 holes for the sprigs of dwarf mondo grass ended up getting sent to our old Bradenton, Fla. address. They corrected the problem (our bad, for not changing the address online) and shipped me a new one which I received today -- a day after I could have used it. (If anyone is in the market for one of these, let's talk).

We ended up using bulb planters to do the job. I broke one of them in the process, since they aren't really designed for planting ground cover.

Then there were the sprigs themselves. For some reason I was expecting 500 of these things to arrive in several good-sized boxes. But when UPS arrived, I was handed a box not much bigger than a shoebox. There were supposed to be 10 groups of 50 plants each, but there were only 10 clumped plants bound by rubber bands in the box.

Me with my box of grass (not that kind).

Considering these things were 69 cents each (you do the math, I don't want to talk about it), I was a little panicked and perturbed to say the least. Not something else going wrong, I thought.

Turns out though, each clumped plant grouping contained 50 individual sprigs when you pulled the rubber band off. Ohhh ...

And to the credit of Classy Groundcovers in Blairsville, Ga., I got a call back literally five minutes after e-mailing them that I thought there was a problem. No problem, just a lot of time and work sticking these little suckers into the ground, one by one.

Squirrel bait

Now I'm trying to keep this damned squirrel from digging them up, hunting for nuts. Hey you little bastard, go dig somewhere else or I'll eat you!

Anyway, enough blathering on. It's done. Hopefully we can enjoy it.

Brian.