Landscaping

6/30/2005-

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6/30/2005    I'm sitting here right now dripping with sweat and hating summer weather.
    That's not really true.  I need to drop five or thirty pounds so this is really good for me and the results are always immediate when you're talking about landscape work.  There's a sense of gratification at the end of the day when you finally crack open a beer and survey the land as you think to yourself, "What the hell was I even thinking?!  I must be insane."
     We have azaleas that needed sunlight so I had to cut away a lot of tree branches.  Now I have to cut them up, bundle them and one day have them hauled away.
    The grass is knee-deep so that had to be whacked down.  Not mowed, whacked.  Our hill doesn't allow for mowers even though we own a beauty.  It's in mint condition and always will be.
6/7/2007     The before-mentioned azaleas died.
     Anyway, other than critical maintenance we decided not to do anything else with our landscaping until the house was completed.  One such project became necessary this year when we noticed that the forest and our back yard were becoming as one.  It seemed we were losing our view by small degrees but it was so gradual that we didn't really do anything about it.
     Yesterday I decided to trim this snowball bush back by the old structure at the end of the yard.  Then I noticed that the Pyracantha bush had grown a bit large so I decided I'd give it a few minutes of my time, too.  If you aren't familiar, the Pyracantha is a bush which is covered with thorns and produces clusters of bright orange berries in the fall.  Most descriptions of this bush say it grows up to eight feet tall.  Ours was closer to 12' tall and equally wide.  They also forget to mention that the billions upon billions of thorns have a poison in them that will produce an incredible itching sensation which lasts for days with even the slightest scratch.
    Anyway, four hours later I had cut one deadly branch away at a time until my arms were a swelling mass of scratches and punctures, but I think I killed the bastard.  It was probably some kind of freak that professional gardeners would have deemed a Maryland state record and worshipped with their strange Druid ways, but I didn't care.  By the time I was finished I'd lugged my entire arsenal of cutting tools out there (including my reciprocal saw) and left just enough of it to gloat over its skeleton-like stump.  True, I was probably not going to sleep for the next week from the itch-causing toxins it had released into my bloodstream but I didn't care.  I'd won.
     And then I looked at the insurgent forest and grinned.  It was time to party.
     Limb after limb came down as I went into a mad frenzy.  The air became thick with dust and pollen as my assault on Mother Nature continued and horticulturists everywhere suddenly paused and wept as they felt a strange disturbance in The Force.  I didn't care.  I was in a blood frenzy and nothing was going to deter me from my task.  I'm sure my neighbors had to be wondering if Beth was okay as they heard the chainsaw blazing and my screams of both frustration and triumph.
    Someone actually owns the property to the left of our house but it's nothing more than a steep hill and utterly worthless for anything and this is where I threw all of the debris.  At first I felt kind of naughty for tossing the remnants of the Pyracantha onto his property but it was soon covered up with the many limbs and leaves from branches that had grown over from his lot.  I justified my ignorant actions by claiming it as  a rental fee for the intrusion of his crappy tree limbs in my yard.  I've heard the guy is a Baltimore lawyer who walks the property every year but I've been here for three years and have never seen any evidence of this.  I'm hoping the guy is now too old to take his little walks because it is now impassable.
     In the end it looked fantastic.  The view out the kitchen window is completely changed now that it is open and airy and full of morning light.  We can see the old stone barbeque pit and the old out building and we're really looking forward to seeing that cute little 4' snowball bush blossom next year, the sole survivor of the slaughter.
6/3/2008      Yes, it's a year later, and the Pyracantha came back again.  This year, I dug down about two feet all around it and used my chain saw to cut it below ground level.  While doing so, I wrenched my ankle something fierce and so I now have a temporary disability; two strained tendons.  We've also started 'terracing' the back yard, which is a fancy way of saying we've put in a few perennials on the hilly area, and surrounded them with rocks.  Oh, well.  IT ain't the Garden of Eden, but it's better than nothing.
6/27/2008      It's been 3 weeks, and my ankle is still in pain, but not as badly as before.  At least I can walk again.
     We finally got around to cleaning up the small alcove area off the Green Room, and were delighted to discover that we are the proud owners of a patio. There's really no telling when it was covered with mud and buried, but I'd have to guess that it was back in the early 1970's, perhaps a little earlier.  It took us only a few hours to excavate and clean it up, and Beth has decided that I should enlarge it so that we have a much more welcoming area for potential guests, parties, or whatever.
     I also dug a massive trench along the top of the wall to carry rain water away from the house, while also creating a nice walking path.  It's pretty cool. 
      I also built a small stacked stone wall.  Best to see the pictures on the photo page to get a feel for it as words just don't do it justice.
      The upper yard has always had this useless 'yucky' feel to it, and now it's suddenly starting to feel like the preferable place to hang out.   Over the coming years it will be interesting to see where this part of the project takes us.  Who knows?  We may end up having one of the coolest little yards around, and the hill, once a curse, may lend itself to some truly creative ideas.  After all, a flat yard really is kind of boring.

5/24/2009

     I can see that my journal writings (blogging) has been sorely ignored.  Since the last writing we were given permission to take all the foundation stones from the old Darr house that burned down several years ago, and we've begun terracing an area off the discovered patio with them.  Beth planted azaleas at the top, and this time they actually survived!
     On top of that, we also discovered yet another patio area at the lower level of the yard back by the ancient BBQ pit.  This one is made up of natural flat river stones, and was probably used for entertaining during cook outs.  We're still scraping away a century's worth of dirt and debris as we try to figure out how big it actually is but from what we can tell so far it's a semi-circular shape, roughly 18' x 12'. Such a truly cool discovery!
      This has made us rethink what the old stone building was.  True, it was used as a greenhouse in later decades when the BBQ went into a state of disrepair, and the patio was buried, but perhaps it was a small housing for an covered eating area in its earliest days.  There's no real way to tell.  Our hopes are that we'll unearth steps leading from the patio up to it, but it's going to take a lot of digging to find out.

6/16/2009

     I took a little time to drag out the old power washer in order to see if I could use it to expedite the removal of dirt from the patio area by the BBQ pit.  After blasting away a furrow for the water to escape, I began by digging out deep areas between the stones, partially for the water to reach the furrow, and partially to remove a century's worth of damage.  Look at it like flossing.  The process took about 2 hours, but in the end it was worth it.  The patio is completely excavated, and now we can buy a few trays of moss to fill in between the rocks so that the area will be both stabilized, and pretty.
    I should mention here that if you own two puppies, this is not a great idea when they're around.  Cleaning all the spattered mud off both them and myself took forever, but they had a lot of fun.
    Still no signs of steps leading up to the old structure on the hill, but we're still hoping.