Thoughts from the Editor

The thing that nobody told me as a 20-something purchasing our first home was the amount of skills, tools, and time I would need to accrue in order to adequately care for our property. Hint: It’s a lot.

In our 18 years of marriage, my wife and I have owned four different homes, each with their own unique characteristics and challenges. With each home came a backyard that needed its own version of “TLC.” Now as a homeowner, I had to go from a kid who knew how to pull weeds and mow the lawn into a man who was capable of handling anything that happened in the yard. This was a challenge I was not prepared for.

Our first home had ten massively overgrown oleander “bushes” that I quickly found out were toxic for our 1-year-old yellow Labrador. Everyone knows that when your new puppy is endangered by an ugly, overgrown bush (or ten) the only thing to do is put on the old Pendleton flannel jacket and get to chopping.

Our second home had a terrible drainage problem, with a ridiculous slope from the back of the property towards our patio. Water liked to pool here and create a small mud pit for our toddlers to muck around in. In this yard, I learned how drainage works and what it takes to level a yard with a Bobcat skid-steer.

With our third home, we inherited a beautifully manicured backyard that an elderly couple had lovingly tended for decades. It was a welcome relief to have a beautiful and functional yard, but it needed some fun. So we built a custom playhouse equipped with a slide, which became the infamous scene of a game of tag that resulted in my middle daughter's first broken arm that year.

Our current home came to us with a third-acre of what I affectionately call “moon dirt” as soil. For a time, I was convinced that someone had intentionally poisoned the empty lot we built our house on. The first grass I planted looked like it had mange, and when I tried to dig a hole in the concrete, I mean, the ground, it was so hard that I ruined my best shovel. Over the last three years, I've dragged every manner of yard implement through that ground, amended the soil over and over, even rebuilt the sprinkler system on a few occasions. This year, the yard is finally starting to flourish.

In a world that demands immediate results, the time it takes to create a beautiful backyard can be seen as a problem to outsource. But I don’t regret a moment of the back-breaking work and joy I’ve discovered while shaping my backyards. I’ve spent more time cursing the busted sprinklers, gophers, and weeds than I care to admit. I’ve given up and tried again on hundreds of occasions when I did not have the requisite skill, strength, or understanding to make our vision a reality. Now, as I look back through the years, I can see that with all the effort I’ve put into creating a yard, I have also been formed into something new and better.

Cheers,

Eric Riley Executive Editor Lifestyle Magazine President / Owner Topograph