And in the midst of it all, I have managed to not entirely neglect my house. We have been meaning to fix up the backyard for a while. However, being the backyard, we can't find it in us to splurge on money for landscaping. Those rock wall borders, or even the logs can be quite pricey when we talk about enough to frame out an area. I have been following a lot of facebook groups on Off the Grid living, or Sustainable living and brainstormed some excellent ideas. We finally decided on using our beer bottles to build a border, which we can then fill in with mulch. Between us, our friends, and our room-mates (all being about in our 20s), I found we go through a surprising amount of beer. Well, I suppose I am TheCraftBrewMrs after all. So we decided, instead of self-shaming over our indulgences at the end of the week, we will turn it into something very useful. We put out a proclamation to reserve all dark colored beer bottles. Shortly after, I saw a shelf in the garage fill up with bottle after bottle and several weeks (and one house party) later, we had our materials!
So rather than a random tree in the middle of sandy dirt and patches of grass, we have a nicely edged focal point. I even added some lovely "chicken gizzards" as I've been told they are called from my friends' nursery, and a handful of white snapdragon flowers. I am hoping to go back over them and put a dab of glue between the bottles to keep them all upright. They are pretty sturdy on average but once in a while the dogs try to jump into the flower bed and kick one. As for the future, we have continued collecting and hope to tackle the papaya tree next! 