Pressure cookers are dangerous. I’m affraid every year that i’m somehow going to blow it up and have green beans all over the place. And yes that can happen.

Final product.
If you do anything with green beans do you say break beans or snap beans?
Does anyone “jar” any veggies or put up any food from a garden?

(Here is a guide to canning beans)

It’s quite unusual, but I fell in love with it immediately. I often looked at it thinking, “Ahhhh…the possibilities are endless.” I visioned the hill filled with wildflowers and greenery with beautiful flowers along the stones and cement pieces. I wanted Morning Glories planted underneath the wood rail that lines the cement stairs on the side of the house so they would wrap themselves around the railing. For several years we talked about doing the work to achieve this, but summer after summer went by and it remained untouched and overgrown with vines, weeds, shrubs and leaves.

During the first week of March we had a fairly warm day and Lori and I sat outside on the front porch. After talking we decided that this year we were going to tackle this project in full and it would be done by the end of April. A couple days later we put on our old clothes and sneakers, geared up with gloves, rakes, the weed trimmer, and shovels and headed outdoors to begin.

I don’t think either of us were prepared for what lay ahead. Underneath the leaves were thick overgrown vines that covered the ground. I spent most of the first day raking a small section and wrapping the vines around my hand and pulling. The ones at the bottom were easy, but climbing the hill on my hands and knees to get the ones towards the top proved to be a bit more challenging. The hill is too steep to walk up and the ground is soft so getting solid footing is a problem. By the end of the first day my knees and hands were bruised and scraped, the muscles in my body were screaming and my lips were sunburned. I stood there looking at the progress that we had made and it felt good!

Since then we’ve been spending days outside clearing the hill, pulling shrubs, cutting down small trees, raking, hauling everything into the woody area in the backyard and shoveling heavy soil to clear the stairs. We’ve slipped in muddy spots, slid down the hill, gotten poked by many of the bushes with large thorns, knicked ourselves with the saw, and scraped our arms and legs in the process, but I am happy to say that we are halfway through this tedious project and will be done by the end of this month. We have even started some of our plants and flowers inside and they are all peeking through the soil.

I’m sure that if we would have done this a few years ago it wouldn’t have been this hard to complete, but what’s done is done. It’s getting done this year and that’s all that matters and the end result will be absolutely stunning. Both Lori and I have enjoyed being outdoors and working on this landscaping project together. In the past a friend of mine, who’s husband owns a landscaping business, offered to clear the hill for us free of charge, but I said no. I’m glad that I made that decision. This summer, when we’re sitting on the front porch admiring the flower gardens and greenery I can look at Lori and say, “We did it.”