Getting My Yard Ready For Winter

I'd planned on getting synthetic grass to put in my front yard, but never got around to it because I didn't see any on sale and didn't want to pay full price if I could find some on sale... And then promptly forgot all about it. However on my last grocery shopping trip, while waiting for my turn at the register, I saw someone with what looked like rolls of synthetic grass in her cart. I took a closer look, and in fact, it was, and she said that the grocery store was selling it, and pointed me to a section of the store that I'd missed. The price was terrific, 16 dollars for each 50 square foot (10 feet by 5 feet) roll. I bought 4, knowing that it would most likely be enough to cover the areas of my front yard that I wanted to be covered. Since my current tenants have use of my front yard as part of their contract, they chipped in for half the cost of this, as they also wanted it placed.

I have a procrastination problem, never remembering to get around to things that aren't urgent, but in the past that had caused me a lot of trouble, especially when I didn't get around to getting my yard ready for the winter and broke my trampoline and pool because of it.

The rainy winter season is about to start (I actually felt a drizzle yesterday) and I knew I needed to stop procrastinating and get my yard ready now, not later. The synthetic grass was extra important before it started raining because otherwise my yard would just be muddy and not accessible.

We started by taking down the shade tarp from the pergola in our front yard.   

The next step was taking down the net from my trampoline. Last winter I didn't take it down and the net ended up working as a sail in the wind and the poles holding up the net snapped in half and I couldn't find replacement poles on sale anywhere. So I made the decision to take down the net and put it away so that my trampoline can safely be used next spring.

Once that was done, we moved the trampoline over as much as the yard would allow, and cleaned up underneath it. There was a lot of matted and dead overgrown plants, which we pulled /raked up. I discovered a nice aloe Vera plant that had been smothered and was in the area that I planned on putting the synthetic grass, so I dug it up and planted it where there was room along the edges of my yard. I have a giant lemongrass plant that spreads like wild, so I thinned it out tremendously. We also raked up all the random bits of plant matter in the middle of the yard. I have plants growing along the edge of the yard, but the stuff in the middle was weeds. Also any garbage that blew into the yard or that my dog stashed there was removed.

 

After the yard was cleaned, hard work began. When I ordered a crane with dirt for the backyard, to level the garden for our pool, we also got a ton of dirt for the front yard, but the truck with the crane couldn't get close enough to my yard to deposit it into my yard, so the operator put down this giant sack of dirt a few meters from my front steps. And I hadn't gotten around to doing the hard work of shoveling it into buckets and bringing it up the stairs into my yard one at a time. But my tenant's son helped with this, and as a team we brought it into my front yard, where we raked it out, to make the yard as level as possible.

Then we laid out the synthetic grass. This was a puzzle of sorts since each section was ten feet by five feet and my yard's dimensions were quite different, so I had to figure out what would be the best configuration possible to have as many whole pieces of synthetic grass as possible. But I managed, and the four rolls of grass was literally the perfect amount, fitting like a glove.

The last step was then sticking down the synthetic grass. Doing it professionally costs a lot of money and is a ton of work, but I wasn't interested in that. I did it simply and cheaply. To do that, I entirely soaked the entire area of the synthetic grass with a lot of water, and the mud glued it down.

And with that, we put everything back into place in the yard and voila, the yard is ready for the winter.

Well, the front one anyhow. The back one has the pool in it and the shade tarp. I need to put it away already, before the rainy season starts, because I don't want to damage it like I did my last pool. We will be having one last hurrah swim in the pool within the next few days, and then away it goes. To be put up again next summer to enjoy it.

It was a lot of work to get my yard ready, but the results were worth it. Only 64 dollars for the whole thing, and a drastic difference.

Do you need to do things to get your yard ready for the winter? What are those things?