Farm Beautification

Helping mom and dad to beautify their gorgeous farm

My parents have a beautiful small farm, about 13 acres. There are always so many areas that need extra attention. I am glad to assist with this as I love to landscape, and since my farm was sold 2 years ago, I have the privilege to work with mom and dad here.

This area has the original small cabin that dad built on the property after they purchased it in 1984. They lived about an hour and 1/2 from here in Alexandria, so this became their home away from home, and all 6 of us kids and our families would come out to spend our time enjoying their land and our family.

This area around the little cabin had become terribly overgrown, with the cabin entry way always kept cleared, but the “picnic” area next to the cabin overgrown. These are the times when it is for those of us that are young enough to do the work to just do it. There was a picnic table in under all that brush ,LOL. I could barely see it in there. It took about 4 days of weed whacking, mowing, team lifting of the remnants of the oak tree that had been cut into huge sections. Dad got out the railroad tie lifter that he has and we were able to get those huge logs moved.

Dad got his tractor and pulled out a couple scrub trees that were just a little too big for us to get out by hand. Then were able to proceed with the clean up and the beautification of this area.

This is the progression; we moved some plants from another area that needed to be transplanted. We purchased castle stones to build the garden beds. My brother and friend helped get the big plants transplanted as that was quite a chore! There are a couple little tattered squirls that I found under the overgrowth and decided they deserved to be in the garden after having survived all this! The squirls were full of holes, most likely from bb”s…we have lots of boys in our family that love to shoot bb’s! Now they are there safe and happy in the garden! LOL

We have a giant rock pile in the tree line made from the tons of rocks found around the property, so we loaded up a boatload of them to use in this project. It is always fun to use rocks in landscaping, for me anyway! There is a huge rock in the garden bed that is almost 4 feet across! It took 3 of us to get that rock into the wheelbarrow and my little brother had to use all his energy to push that thing up to the garden, but when we got it there it was so beautiful and we were very happy to have given that rock a new home in the new garden bed.

We made a new fire pit in hopes of having one close by that our dear momma could enjoy, then I used the rocks to make an outline for another bed that I could put big pots in that would help make sure that no one would be able to run into the firepit accidently.

This project took about a week to accomplish and was very satisfying. I used about 50 bags of mulch all total. These floor of the picnic area is red gravel that my brother and his wife put down back in the late 80’s so we have a good base for the picnic table to sit on. Then I filled the black pots with garden pot soil so they would make a good base for the plants that would be installed. I also used lots of plants that we had growing here and there, many of which were hostas that needed to be divided. Using what you have is the absolute best way to have new plant areas with not much expense for plants.

This was an awesome project, and liked hoped momma and dad were able to come out and enjoy it! That to me is a win win. Momma got to have lots of things she loved, flowers, fire pits, family all around to enjoy she and dads farm and all the love we could ever ask for from our parents!

Dad and momma, baby bro and Molly enjoying the newly revamped picnic area. I can’t tell you the joy I have in helping my parents to enjoy their time here on their little farm. Love your family while they are here, for not one of us is promised tomorrow.

Enjoy a fire, some family and maybe a hotdog or 2!

Signing off from down on the farm as our momma would always say!