The backyard

I haven't posted any pictures of the backyard lately. (Here's a before post for purposes of comparison). The mission was to encourage water to flow away from the house, and we've had a few hard rains with no wet floors downstairs, so I would have to call that mission accomplished. The cosmetic aspects are still very much a work in progress though (I still have no stairs from the back door to the patio, for instance).

Here's a shot of where the Bobcat tracks were last year. Can't even tell now, can you? The dirt pile is left over from the gardens. The plan is to cover it with rock and plant a few herbs to grow between the rock, but that won't be happening until next spring:

This doesn't look like much now that I pulled all the wildflowers out. It doesn't usually look so much like plain dirt, honest! The morning glories made it all the way to the top of the trellis for the first time this year. The Boston ivy has only just started climbing up after our excessively dry summer:

This is where the other half of the old patio covered. The open patch is dirt mixed with concrete, and it's at an angle to carry water away from the house. We had talked about what to cover it with, but when that moss started growing we decided that was cooler than anything we had planned, so we're leaving it (and hopefully it will spread more and thicken; that would be really cool):

This part has had the least work done so far (the rock the patio crew threw down for Bobcat traction is still there). A few plants have been put in, but the plan is for more ferns and shade plants to leave nothing but a little trail:

Last pic is the stump of the crabapple tree. Or it used to be the stump; it's now an enormous fungus. Oliver refuses to go into the backyard because it completely freaks him out. Thankfully the fact that he has a terrific view of it from his bedroom window hasn't been a problem. Or maybe that's what has him up in the middle of the night, nightmares of the fungus crawling in his window...