Rethinking our Strategy and Other Updates

With the recent boldness of people jumping into the backyard and stealing our rotor tiller, it became quickly apparent the privacy hedge we had planned for in 2015 can’t wait!  And yes I say people, because they couldn’t come in through the gate, it is locked and there is stuff stored in the path to it.  Which means they had to hop the fence into the backyard and lift it OVER the fence.  The tiller was a mid-grade heavy duty one, which means it is heavy.  It takes 2 men to lift it into anything.  So to get it over the fence that means it took 2-4 people to steal it.  What is funny is there is plenty of other more expensive things looming in our backyard…..but it’s the thought of knowing someone was staking out the backyard.  It means they totally studied it to know what they wanted to take.  Which is very bothersome.  Yes we live right next to a HUGE park, so anyone can peer into the backyard at any given time. Of course it also means we see all sorts of things that we don’t necessarily want to see or want to explain to our kids (my kids got their sex education simply by living next to the park, the most recent being a month ago when Jacee got home from school!)
So we have decided that planting a hedge has become a necessity.   We have always wanted the privacy from the openness of the park, and we knew that if we put up a 6 foot wooden fence it would get trashed (graffiti and such) so we went with the idea of a privacy hedge.  We have spent hundreds on bushes to plant and the dogs trample everything (we even put up a fence!).  So we gave up, and just decided to put it off until other parts of the yard were established.
However, thankfully we found the Arbor Day Foundation!  We have found a quick growing hedge that grows up to 3 feet a year! If you join them (which is completely inexpensive) not only do you get 10 free trees to plant in your yard or the option to donate to our forests, but you get membership pricing on all other trees!   So we are going to attempt a hedge yet again, and try some other creative way to keep the dogs out, and hope they grow! I think we need all the growing energy anyone wants to send out way!
Onto other things, how we were able to afford to do this this year…..we ended up going a different route on the greenhouse.  We were going to build a greenhouse/shed combo.  And we were building the greenhouse portion first, and adding the shed later, and through lots of research I realized it would be cheaper to build the type of greenhouse we wanted from scratch.  But Harbor Freight had their greenhouses on sale about a month and a half ago, and the sale price made it about $150 cheaper to buy the kit!  So we bought it and finally put a little time on the calendar (and the weather finally cooperated) and were able to start on it yesterday.  We got the frame built, along with the base.  Now we just need to add the windows, the doors, and the greenhouse panels.  It is not exactly the plan we had, and the shed will now be the thing that waits until 2015.
So the theme for the year seems to be flexibility.  We had this grand plan of how to get the homestead completed, but it seems that the plan we had needed changing up.  Of course not knowing exactly what to expect, we figured it would be a learning process so we expected to have to shift things around.  Expect the unexpected and be flexible!
None the less, the transformation has begun…..I have added before pictures to the gallery.  There are before pictures (with the deck, didn’t get any last year before the deck), and I have added a “transformation” album to document the journey!
The next 6 weeks will be planting the garden, transplanting the things we already started, getting the greenhouse planned and set up, and of course planting the 40 hedge bushes we just bought! (in between everything else!)