In leiu of doing an actual workout this evening, I decided to do some yardwork. I have, of late, taken to substituting my Thursday evening workout on the recumbant bike with mowing the front yard – an activity which is actually somewhat more strenuous than the bike! – so I thought I might replace a few more indoor exercises with some outdoor ones.

My main task is to reclaim the backyard from the overgrown shrubbery which, like last summer, are trying to take over the area. Tonight I worked on a few bushes by the house, starting with this relatively small one by the den window:

I forgot to take a before picture, so you’ll just have to take my word for it, that it looks much better now.

I did, however, remember to take a before picture of the other bushes I planned on trimming …

… then went at them with my pruning sheers.

Much better, doncha think?

I didn’t bother with The Behemoth – the ginormous thing that’s almost single-branchedly taking over the backyard

but I did trim around a flower bud I noticed trying to make its way up among the branches of The Behemoth

It’s the only one of these flowers that is going to bloom for us this year, so I wanted to give it a fighting chance. Eventually I will be removing The Behemoth and filling that space with an above-ground pond. Whether or not I’ll put fish in my pond has yet to be decided, but there will definitely be a water feature there.

After all that chopping and hacking, I went around to the side of the house to see how the garden was doing. Everything is growing pretty well, except the zucchini. Mom and I think we just got bad plants. There are a few blossoms on the plants, but they haven’t grown much, and still don’t look so good.

The cucumbers, however, look fabulous and have several blossoms on them!

The tomatoes are looking good too with each plant sporting some fruit:

We have some sad looking eggplants, too, but I am always confusing them for the zucchini (which means that picture of zucchini up there could easily be eggplant), so no picture of them.

Finally we have the peppers. The original plants we bought aren’t growing too much, although they both have good sized peppers on them now:

Mom bought some more pepper plants a few weeks ago and planted them in a spare pot. These plants look better, but they’re not producing anything yet.

We also discovered we’ve become the soon-to-be-built home of some swallows (I know that picture is hard to see, as it was nearly 8 p.m., but trust me, there’s a swallow up there building a mud nest on the side of our house):

There are suddenly hundreds of swallows around; not quite sure where they came from. We’ve never had them before, as much as we enjoy birds, we don’t think we want them building mud nests on the side of our house. I was too tired to deal with them tonight, but tomorrow night I’ll be washing them down.

Until next time … cheers!