I am developing a severe Pinterest addiction.

I blame my backyard.

My yard was, in general, kind of a wasteland when I moved in. Its was basically just sandy dirt with some weeds thrown in. But nature bounces back pretty quickly and my front yard is looking damn good. The lawn is green, if not exactly all “lawn” in the traditional sense of the word — by which I mean, weeds are just as green as grass when you can’t afford to be picky. My winterberry holly came back nice and green, and my flowers are starting to fill in. Another few months and it will be a paradise compared to what it used to look like.

And while my raised beds are taking shape quite nicely in the back, there’s 3/4 of the yard that’s still unruly. Part of it is taken up by the dog’s pen, but I hope to be rid of that soon when the fence is up. (Of course, getting the fence in means digging and pulling up the dilapidated old fence that’s there.) So while I (and by I, I mean by father and brother) continue to struggle with that, I’ve been thinking about what I’d like to do in terms of a patio.

Of course, it’s not something I want to put a bunch of money into. Basically my goal is to just define a place where my patio table goes, and make it so that table doesn’t need to be moved every time the lawn gets mowed. So I turned to Pinterest.

I’d been thinking about trying to use pea gravel, but I wasn’t sure how that would hold up to the dog. If it was too wide open she’d go tearing across it and the gravel would just  go everywhere. So I was looking for something to help make it more contained. And that’s where the cinder block planters come in…

I want to use four of these as corner posts of sorts. I’d plant herbs and other stinky plants in them to help keep bugs at bay.

Yet, even now as I am mapping this all out in my head, I can’t stop searching Pinterest. Whether it’s a squash trellis or a planter made out of pallets, I just can’t stop pinning…

The board for my garden has nearly tripled in size in just the past couple of days thanks  to my inability to stop looking for beautiful yards that I’ll never be able to imitate. Damn you, Pinterest, for making me and my yard feel so inadequate! But that’s how you keep me coming back, isn’t it? You make feel bad about my yard and then make me believe I can do something about it… Tear me down and build me up again.

You can’t see me, Pinterest, but I’m shaking my fist at you!