Wayne and Erika Pfeiler

If you haven't heard, I'm trying to seed a lawn in the fenced-in part of our back yard. When we moved in, there wasn't anything but a couple of old bushes and lots of leaves and dirt around the patio. Well, after some grass advice from Tom, we ran out to Lowes and got some creeping red fescue seed, lawn starter fertilizer, and a couple large bags of peat moss. I started with a small patch in the back corner and after it sprouted I worked on the rest of the space behind the patio. This second patch took longer to sprout, almost a month, but it finally did today!

Since Annie also uses the backyard for her business, I had to do something to keep her out of the usually damp, sometimes muddy freshly seeded plots of ground. I put together a short fence with several planks of wood, but after a couple weeks Annie learned she could just jump over it. And then we learned that she really liked digging in this dirt also. So I used the parts from the second dog kennel we got with the house to augment the wooden fence, and that's worked fine.

I'm not sure how long it takes grass to fill in well, but hopefully by summer sometime we'll have a much nicer-looking back yard.