Land Barons

 Tongue-in-cheek :)  But we do have 1 rental home as well as take care of my mother's rental.  Seems like this past summer we've spent quite a few weekends (and weekdays) at one or the other fixing something.  The above photos are from the front yard of our rental - we have a very nice young family living there right now, but the yard has just gotten away from them.  It is a hard yard - I struggled with it when we lived in the house.  The above photos show that a few of the trees are suffering from bores (or so our local nursery thinks), and you can see in the top photo that the plant/shrub areas of the yard have gone pretty wild. 

 We sprayed Round Up on things a few weeks ago and last night went over there and pulled, chopped, raked, and sawed until it was pretty cleaned up.

We are far from finished.  Need to get the stump guys over to grind up the stumps of dead or removed trees.  Then the cement edger guy over to lay edging down so the grass stays in it's own area.  Then lay down weed barrier and haul in rock to make things look nice and neat and it is easier for renters to keep the yard crisp and clean.  Next year we plan to start the same process in the back yard.

 We finally got renters in at my mother's rental. When we went over today we were happy to see that the lawn was all nicely mowed....a good sign.   We finally are getting around to replacing some broken boards on the gate to the back yard.  We also needed to trim the bottom of all the gate boards so they didn't scrape on the cement.  That gate has bothered me since we bought the house.  Finally fixed :)