okay do you um have a garden um i have several outside shrubs that i maintain take care of um-hum do you enjoy working out in the yard yeah i certainly do uh i planted uh a rosebed last year um-hum and uh they came out looking really nice lot of red and white ones pink uh-huh i've had some roses out in my backyard too and they've done real well i was surprised i we had some in Virginia and they were real hard to keep up with but seems like they like the Texas climate better uh yeah yeah as as long as you give it uh good drainage and uh lot of uh oh some some plant food once a month right yeah we built up our we built up boxes and put them in that so that they would drain because our soil is so bad where i live do you live in Texas or yeah i'm in uh Plano Plano oh yeah i'm out in Rowlett and we have that brown clay soil and it's real hard to grow anything here yeah i've got a well my roses are on the west side of the house i asked my neighbors what they wanted to see outside their uh front door uh-huh because it's right by their entryway and they they wanted roses so that's what i planted oh that's accommodating um-hum yeah and i still need to assess the damage outside from the the freeze this winter yeah i've got quite a few dead shrubs some and oleander right we've got a few things too it's hard to tell if they'll come back or not yeah the trees are all doing really well i've got a nice Japanese maple out front that uh looking really nice right now well that's good we we planted three pecan trees out front and every one of them died i told my husband this is the last one if it dies we're going to something else uh-huh but we dug a hole about six times as big as it needs to be and filled it with all kinds of compost and pine needles and everything else we could think of hopefully it'll drain this year yeah yeah every year uh there's some freeze damage and i lose different uh variety of shrubs yeah have to go replace them with uh something a little hardier yeah it's hard to find something that'll take the heat as well as the freezing um-hum that we get down here i have a few little flowers i plant around the trees out front i've enjoyed doing those i put uh pansies out in the winter and they pretty much last all winter and then i put uh moss rose out in the summer and it just goes crazy you don't really have to do anything to it uh-huh puts a lot of color out there yeah i don't do much with flowers myself i just get a lot of evergreen evergreen type shrubs some uh all year right some uh dwarf Burford hollies and Yaupon hollies oh yeah those do pretty well here don't they they do very well um-hum we've got my husband put a little row of those out in the backyard to kind of make a little cut so that the kids wouldn't come marching through the yard and everything yeah they make a nice hedge uh yeah and the nice thing about those types of hollies is you don't have to trim them uh into a boxy type hedge you can just let them uh grow their natural uh shape right yeah the only thing i don't like about them is weeding around them because they get so sharp pricky things get in your hands oh yeah oh i've got some Chinese Hollies that are just outrageous they they are very sharp oh really do you do your own uh lawn maintenance or do you hire somebody to uh to do that yeah we do it my husband does most of the mowing and edging and all that stuff yeah i do that myself too i i really don't appreciate them calling me up all the time to try to push their services on me yeah we get something on the door about every week because i've got a very small yard the entire size of the lot is only forty five by ninety feet uh-huh it's what they call low maintenance yard and these uh uh maintenance uh companies call up wanting to uh uh put put the uh weed killer and the fertilizer down and they want they want to charge forty or forty five dollars per application for my size yard i i don't spend that much in a year yeah really oh our neighbor has a lawn service come and do his and i don't think it looks any better than what my husband does so uh-huh i'm not really tempted to do that either if it doesn't take much work yeah i can mow the backyard but there's something about the grass in our front yard is so dense huh uh-huh that the mower wheels just kind of bog down in there and i can not push it yeah i've got a little electric mower and i i will never buy another one of those again oh really it's fine for my size yard but uh it really doesn't have the power of a gas motor huh i would like a self-propelled one i think um-hum that might make it easier it's better for for a large yard yeah ours is not that big but like i said if i had to mow the front i'd be stuck because i can't get it to move yeah before i moved down here when i was up uh north in Wisconsin living with my folks they lived on uh three and a half acres of land and uh we started mowing that with a push mower oh uh they finally got smart and got a riding lawn mower which was a big improvement for for us us kids who had to go out there and uh mow the the grass every every week oh i'm sure yeah that's a pretty large area it it still took a few hours even with the riding mower really did people up there edge as pri as strictly and stuff as they do down here um not nearly as much as here uh i think it's probably because we lived out in the country somewhat and uh there just wasn't the emphasis on keeping the yards looking real nice yeah yeah i lived in a town it was a college town in Virginia and i mean people kept their lawns mowed but they sure didn't get into like they do here in Texas wasn't a source of pride or something like it is down here yeah a lot of people do but then again there are a lot who do nothing yeah my street uh is kind of in between there are a couple of uh neighbors who are are really good about planting flowers and trees um-hum but there the majority really haven't done anything with their yards this neighborhood is is four years old yeah and you would think that uh in that time they'd uh get their lawns and and gardens established yeah it's hard i know we tried to do our landscaping out front my husband tilled it up in the fall and then we've been waiting on some guy supposed to be getting us some edging for like ten cents a foot instead of a bout a dollar and uh he has never got it to us so it just sits out there kind of dug up and doesn't look too good so i can't say anything about anybody else's um-hum yeah i'd like to see the the neighbors put some trees in the front yards anyway just to get something started yeah it'd seem like they'd want to just to uh get some shade and keep their houses a little bit cooler in the summer right you'd think that that would be the first thing they would do as far as the yard goes is to plant a tree yeah yeah it's nice when the builders plant trees for you when when they build the house yeah did they not put any in in your neighborhood no uh my builder was Gemcraft and they didn't put uh trees in at all we had two trees in the front of our yard and then one of them died and so that's where we keep putting that pecan keeps dying we have uh i think it's a Silver Leaf Maple or something like that that's hung on out there yeah the trouble with with builders planting the trees is they they get the weaker varieties ones that aren't as desirable right and uh those include Arizona Ash and in some cases silver maples yeah hope ours continues to live it's been there about four i guess almost four years now so maybe it's established established enough that it'll go on and survive yeah that's probably true i've got a live oak in front uh i i really like the oaks a lot i like an oak oak trees yeah they're very hardy for this area my um husband's father has a place out in East Texas so he's always digging up little red oaks and things like that and trying to bring them back and start them but um-hum so far we haven't had much luck oh i had a red oak a few years ago that i bought from uh from a guy who sold trees off the back of a trailer and that was a mistake for uh well two reasons one thing it wasn't insured uh-huh oh and the other reason was that i bought it in spring and it was a balled and bur lapped tree uh right before summer the heat of summer it couldn't uh take the heat and it died oh yeah well that's too bad we've got all of our trees from Calloway's and luckily they'll take them back any time for any reason if they die yeah i usually go to Callaway's or Wolfe um-hum Callaway's tends to have nicer shrubs uh more fully developed uh-huh and uh i don't think there's a problem with the warranty on any of those places although they have cut back on their uh warranty for the shrubs the past couple of years yeah i know the guy at Wolfe told us they cut back on the tree warranty like six months or less yeah but Calloway's has kept theirs forever so really well that's good for trees i don't think they do that for shrubs yeah yeah i don't know we haven't bought i think it's still a year or less for uh for shrubs uh-huh we haven't bought any shrubs shrubs yet hopefully i think we've almost waited this too late this year now to start putting in anything of any size oh it's never too late to plant something unless unless well for trees if they're balled and bur lapped it's recommended to plant them in the fall or winter yeah but for uh just shrubs say five gallon or one gallon shrubs any time of the year is fine oh really it wouldn't matter if we plant them when it was starting to get warmer right just have to take care of them and water them uh so they get established put some uh uh some uh uh root stimulator yeah right right some uh stimulator down so uh yeah it's never a problem to plant things in the summer oh well that's good to know maybe there's still hope for our front yard this summer then i'm just waiting for a sale uh-huh they haven't really had any good sales on plants yet yeah i've i've noticed that they haven't had anything great so but once they uh drop the prices a little bit i'll be out there uh picking up a few more shrubs to fill in where we're where my dead shrubs are right now i haven't even pulled them out of the ground yet right yeah yeah last year we thought some were dead and finally they started leafing out again at the bottom so we just cut them way back and and was able to save them but this year they look even worse you have to watch the like the crepe myrtles um-hum because they'll look really bad like they're dead and all of a sudden they'll bud out yeah i've got several crepe myrtles that look just awful and uh there are buds coming out all over the place now huh ours haven't done anything yet this year i have a crepe myrtle tree in the backyard that still hasn't done anything and i'm kind of wondering what kind of shape it's in right now yeah i like crepe myrtles they really add a lot of color have to make sure they don't get out of hand in the summer oh we haven't had that problem yet they're pretty ours are pretty small they they can tight they can get out of control oh really but mine keep dying back down to the ground so i haven't had that problem yet yeah but i do have some really nice Boston ivy on the west side of the house oh does it grow along a fence or something grows on the on the brick oh on the house itself uh-huh that you have to really watch uh to uh keep it under control because they will take over a house if you don't uh tend to it uh-huh uh those things grow about an inch a day