Sweet Fern Tea

I've lived in my current home since 2004 but have never done any landscaping in the back yard.  It's all just gone to weeds.  I found some great perennials and got some from friends and decided to tackle this as a project.  Here are 2 before pictures:

I  started this 2 weeks ago but just finished it around noon today since I'm not a huge fan of hot weather.  Working on it in 1-3 hour increments, the entire project took about 15 hours.  This morning our weather people were talking about a heat advisory.  Temps in the 90's and the heat index bringing it to over 100° - yikes!  When I went out before 9am to water my plants, it was breezy and the sky was cloudy.  Perfect!

Here are some after photos:

I dug a couple Sweet Fern bushes, to include in my planting, from across the street in the weedy area that's sort of a 'no-man's-land.'  After all the planting was done I decided to Google Sweet Fern.  It's used for diarrhea and also for poison ivy!  I also found a Sweet Fern Tea recipe!  

http://www.writerbynature.com/2006/07/12/wild-edible-recipe-sweet-fern-tea/

If you have some of this growing near you, you might want to give it a try.

As you can see, I was a dirty mess by the time I was finished!  Glad to be done with this project.  I'll take a little time to unwind over our Holiday Weekend and then see what other projects I can find.

For all my US Blogging friends — Happy Independence Day.  Hope you all have a great weekend.