Gardeners are the best.

We had a team of experts come to our house this morning and they went to town on our landscaping! Mandy and I went to an Urban Edible Gardening 101 class held by the awesome Adriana of Anarchy in the Garden fame (she lives a block away from us now! Awesome!) so I was super jazzed to come home to all the weeds and crappy spiky plants  in our yard ripped up. All of those brown pods that made Crum throw up were also picked up and the tree was trimmed way back. The yard looks so great right now, and we have plans for some cool agaves, firesticks, and dark succulents but it can wait. First priority in the yard: my raised bed. Adriana gave us little tomato seedlings at the class today (my heirloom varietal is called "Mortgage Lifter"!) so I want to make it a home soon.

Pictures!

They trimmed the walkway hedges way back, ripped out those giant spiky plants that poked out our eyes whenever we passed, and also took out a few other yucky spider-harboring plants that blocked our view from the living room window. They also showed us how to run our sprinklers so that grass will be looking healthier soon.

On the side of the house we had these beautiful lilies that were hidden by bigger and deader lily plants. The fumigation did a number on these but clearing out the ones that suffered exposed the healthy ones below that were protected.

Look at their flowers! Gorgeous. And there are a bunch of unopened flower heads on the rest of the plants so I'm looking forward to them all blooming.

A view of the side of the house. It looks so much better cleaned up, and it will be much easier for us to maintain and keep trimmed now. And by "us" I mean Jeff.

Our backyard flowers are so pretty! And they attract a lot of hummingbirds which is awesome.

Our bottlebrush tree is crazy right now. Look at all those blooms! I think hummingbirds like these too. It houses about 37 bird nests too. When we sit under it you can hear all the babies squeaking.

They did such an amazing job on the crazy pod tree. They cleaned up everything that already dropped and cleared out a lot of the branches that were scraping up our roof. We were thinking of taking this tree out and replacing it with something useful like a lemon tree, but now we're kind of liking it. We'll see how it behaves. I still want my lemon tree though.