No Turning Back Now

It's go time.

  

This is about what the yard looked like when we moved into the house a little over a year ago. occasional patches of St. Augustine grass scattered amongst large patches of thick, dead thatch. Weeds everywhere. Occasional dirt patches. More dead grass. And more weeds. Most of it looked like this:

I tried to do what watering I could that first summer, but we spent a solid half of it out of town while the Austin area was going through a pretty severe drought. And with no sprinkler system, my yard didn't get nearly as much water as it needed.

So why "no turning back?" About two hours ago, I put about 5 (diluted) gallons of RoundUp on the yard. And only 18-ish hours before Earth Day! Most of our yard will be completely dead in the next 12 hours or so, and all of it should be dead in 3 or 4 days.

Two weeks from tomorrow I'm going to renovate the entire front yard. That includes fixing and bordering our flower beds, which currently look like this:

As well as re-mulching and bordering our two trees, one of which currently looks like this:

Needless to say, I'll have my work cut out for me—but the result will (hopefully) be a sexy Bermudagrass lawn that's a lot more drought tolerant and a lot less dead. I'll post updates as I do interesting stuff. Wish me luck and stay tuned!