Things I Want to Nail in 2012–and Tools I Need to Sharpen. Goal #3: Creating an Edible Front Yard

Thank you again for sharing your goals with me. A lot of you identified with the trade-offs of delegating: it’s definitely a meaty topic, since we all want to save money, but we also want to enjoy life. Deciding to spend money and hire someone can be tough, and that’s where the “embracing” part comes in. Once we make a decision to delegate, we should relax and enjoy the good part of the trade-off.

Here is more about what you all are up to.

• Vanessa of Mama Scribble is de-cluttering and re-arranging her house, including her garage. To keep herself from being overwhelmed, her mantra is to tackle one project at a time.
• Nichole from the Frugal Mama Makeover Series is committed to decorating her new baby’s nursery on a budget, and rebuilding her emergency savings fund, which they (rightly) used when her husband lost his job.
• Cara’s goal is to convince her husband, who is a DIY master, to consider hiring out some home repairs, especially when it comes to stubborn problems that stress the family.
• Daisy wants to make life easier by streamlining, simplifying, and organizing and is tackling every room in her house. To ease the hype of the holidays next year, she plans to reduce the number of gifts to prepare by agreeing not to exchange with friends.

I’d love to hear from more of you in the comments of this post. I will continue to respond to everyone!

As for me, I am feeling good about beefing up our retirement account by deducting the maximum 15% of my husband’s now full-time salary, and diverting $10,000 of savings into Roth IRAs. That money would have come in very handy for the home renovations, but I vowed not to spend our future nest egg on Moroccan tiles. And I must stick with that — as much as I would love to go nuts with our kitchen update! (You can see picture ideas for my dream kitchen at Pinterest, a new social media site where you can pin images to a virtual board.)

Last night my husband and I talked about the various renovation ideas, and we tried to figure out priorities. This morning I was touched when he offered to take extra weekend calls to make more money for the house projects. My job — coming up in my last goals post — will be to help him out as much as possible by beefing up my own income-earning potential.

Goal #3: Re-Landscaping our Outdoor Space to be Kid- and Food-Friendly

My kids and I have longed to grow food in all the various places we have lived and rented. (Well, maybe not in Milan where the food from the bi-weekly fresh market was so fresh it was still dewey.)

In Arlington, Virginia, we were thrilled when a pumpkin seed planted on a whim sprouted and we ate fried pumpkin flowers all summer. In New York City, I wanted to tend an herb garden or a tomato plant, but the closest we could get to fresh air was three inches of breeze from our top-tilt windows. In Syracuse, we rented a house with a yard, but we since there was a chance we’d be moving again before the growing season began, we didn’t take the plunge.

Our Problem

Everyone likes to eat, but not everyone likes to be outside. My kids often don’t want to go out unless I’m out there, but I get bored of frisbee after approximately three minutes. In 10 Ways to Get Something Done While Outside in Nature with Your Kids, I confessed that I’m a workaholic but I want my kids to play. That’s why I think growing food would make it more fun — for everyone — to be outdoors.

Part of the reason I fell in love with this house was its romantic landscaping in front: willowy pompous grasses, a French garden circle fashioned from salvaged bricks, a giant pink azalea, and whimsical touches like a weeping Japanese maple and a periwinkle-blue snowball bush.

Alas, pretty as it may be, there is no place for the kids to play. The billowing grasses are razor-edged (in fact, they’re often used to deter dogs), and there is no open space. The fact that there is no access to the back yard from our raised deck is not such a big loss considering the unattractiveness of our gravel lawn.

We feel lucky to have this graceful pebble driveway, since most people on our street (and in D.C. in general) don’t have one at all. But it needs to be widened so we don’t keep twisting our ankles on the narrow stone border when we’re getting kids in and out of the car.

What We’ve Done So Far

I’m a big fan of free play, so it’s important to me that my kids have an outdoor space that beckons them. I want them to explore and learn, love and be curious about nature, and get some fresh air and exercise. In the city, we’ll never have the huge backyard we had in Syracuse (which you see in its glory below), so we’ll need to be more creative about maximizing our limited space.

Got Help: Signed on with a Landscape Designer

As I talked about in Making Our House into a Home, I am not talented in design, and I certainly don’t know a thing about plants, gardening, and landscaping. My mom is an enthusiastic gardener, and being an artist, she is a natural designer — but she lives a day’s drive away in Ohio. So to help me create a plan, I asked around and found an affordable landscape designer.

Asking for help from a professional has taken a huge load off. I have so many other projects in my life right now, that the idea of orchestrating an entire redo of our outdoor space was throwing me over the edge. Being new here and never having owned a house, I found even small issues — like finding a good person to help us trim the trees and clean the gutters — was making me want to crawl back in bed. So hiring a local person with lots of contacts and experience is going to be worth every dime.

Tip: If you don’t need a designer but you’d like some help with gardening, a less-expensive option would be to go with a gardening coach. This new kind of service, which I learned about in The Edible Front Yard, is about advising, encouraging, enabling, and collaborating with people on all sorts of situations, like caring for a newly created garden, updating a house’s curb appeal for resale, and brainstorming on planting ideas. To find one in your area, do a web search for “garden coaches.”

Faced Unfun Expenses: Scheduled a Tree Removal

I know, it’s almost sacrilegious to cut down a tree. But we have a craggy old mulberry at the side of our front yard (you can see it here behind the car) that is both a hazard (due to its heavy dead branches) and a nuisance (it drips sap on our cars). Plus, it blocks light to our front yard which we will need if we want to grow edible plants.

The landscape designer recommended an arborist who I finally called and he made me feel even better about chopping it down when he said that mulberries are considered nuisance trees by the city and, therefore, a permit to remove ours would be granted right away.

Given the cost of cutting down the tree and grinding out the stump will be $1,700, it will be a while until we reap the economic benefits of growing our own food. But sometimes saving money is not always the primary motivation. It’s more of a nice side benefit. But that’s OK. If the overall effect is going to improve the quality of our lives, I think it’s worth the investment.

Started the Ball Rolling: Obtained an Estimate for Building Stairs into the Deck

If we are to maximize our outdoor space, our kids need to be able to run in and out from the back door to the back yard (which, due the sloping on our land, is way below our deck). Thankfully putting a set of stairs in the deck is not going to be an expensive job.

What We Will Do This Year

Start Slowly Toward an Edible Front Yard

Most of our sun falls on our front yard, as it does for many people, making the front the best place to grow food. But how do we plant a garden while maintaining style and beauty — and keeping the neighbors happy? The answer is a new trend in American gardening called the Edible Front Yard.  Even though I’m still figuring it out myself, I was recently interviewed by All You Magazine about this movement. Started by pioneers like Ivette Soler, the movement wants to see America’s obsession with grass replaced by a love for plants that are both beautiful and edible.

Did you know that turfgrass is the biggest irrigated crop in America? Soler points out that the time, energy, and resources put into our inert lawns could be redirected towards plants that give us much more in return.

My job this winter is to re-read The Edible Front Yard and choose delicious plants that will also be beautiful throughout the growing season. The next step will be to map out a realistic plan with the landscape designer. I don’t want to admit that gardening with kids is tough (as my colleague at Parentables, Sami Grover, points out), but I really need to start slow in case I can’t keep up with the work. Maybe just plant some herbs, a few tomatoes, some beans, and pumpkins among some pretty bushes and annual flowers to start out? I’ll keep you posted as to what we decide.

Create a Simple but Inviting Back Yard for Free Play

Our back yard is quite shady, but I think the kids would most prefer grass back there. So my job is to research low-light grass that could do well, and create a soft and inviting place for the kids to play. Maybe install a tree swing, a bird feeder, or climbing tree to draw them out.

Budget for Unexciting Projects like Grading Soil and Driveway Work

Oh yeah, and because sometime our basement leaks, we need to prioritize utilitarian projects like grading the soil away from the house. We also need to make our driveway a more comfortable width (plus probably add more pebbles). Finally we need to build a gate across the front, since Luke will run down the sidewalk with a devilish chuckle anytime he gets the chance. If I’m to get any gardening done, I’ll need to corral my kids.

Do any of you have experience with gardening? Do you think I’m crazy to take this on? And please tell me more about your goals for this year.

You also might like:

1. Things I Want to Nail in 2012–and Tools I Need to Sharpen. Goal #2: Making our House into a Home
2. Things I Want to Nail in 2012 and Tools I Need to Sharpen | Goal #1: Face the Scariness of Retirement Saving
3. Creating a Budget in 3 Easy Steps | Step One: Track Your Spending
4. Nine (Nearly) Free Things To Do on Labor Day Weekend
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