“My mom doesn’t have a green thumb. She kills everything,” Emma likes to say, often with more cheer than I feel is kind. But she’s right.

My first apartment was in a four-story building on a busy corner of Queens. Since the owner, who lived elsewhere, did all the building maintenance, I got to rent the super’s apartment. It had its own entrance on the side of the building, and had a small strip of concrete which made a nice little yard. During my first spring in the apartment, my mom showed up with flower boxes for two of the windows. I wasn’t really interested in gardening, but the boxes added a nice touch. I surprised myself by having fun with my little garden, and decided to get some more flowerpots. During the seven years I lived there, I looked forward to planting each spring and  loved having a little bit of green on a busy city street.

My only gardening success story, circa 2000

Unfortunately, I moved into my house with an inflated sense of my ability to garden. I also realized I prefer the small, contained space I used to have. While we don’t have a big lot, there’s still a lot of flower bed space. Bob and I have talked, only half-jokingly, about paving over the entire yard.

The corner section

I’ve learned that flower beds are a lot more work than flower boxes. And my fear threshold for bugs is low. It takes very little to freak me out, and when I see something that freaks me out, which usually happens about five minutes in, I’m done. I know this makes me a loser because some of you are reading this from locations where the bugs are bigger than toddlers.

Every year I promise myself to do something with the yard. I want this to be the year.

The front yard.

I’m thinking about approaching the yard like I’m approaching the house, to think about routines, and getting rid of what I don’t want or need, and thinking about ways to maximize the spaces. Our front yard is nearly twice as large as the back yard, and we have big trees near the street that give us some privacy, so we spend more time there than in the back. The flower beds are ok, but not as nice as I’d like, and need weeding. I should have started when it was cooler, so I could wear jeans and a long top which would protect me from creepy bugs.

Because we spend more time in the front, we’ve neglected the back yard, but I’m trying to give it some attention now. On Monday I hinted at “sort of” bringing in four items. Here they are. They never came into the house and never will so I am not sure if they count. We use the chairs in the front so much that we didn’t want to constantly drag them to the back, so we got these.

Our new backyard seating area

You can see a good part of the yard’s on an incline, which also poses a challenge. I’d like to plant some azaleas or something with thirsty roots because we get a lot of runoff when it rains, which makes the flat part of the yard swampy.

So I’m adding another part to my project, unofficially, because it’s seasonal. By the time I hand this blog off, my efforts will probably be hidden under two feet of snow and ice, so I’m going to do just enough to make me feel happy for the summer.

I will update my stuff in/stuff out numbers on Friday. And here’s a deep, meaningful question: Shoes- how many is too many? Tell me in the comments. Today I spent way too much time thinking about shoes.