The Front Yard is Finally Done

We have finally finished redoing the front yard.  Its very exciting.  Our house is very visible in the neighborhood and we have lots of people watching us as they drive by, making comments as they walk their dogs, and even stopping in their cars to tell us about how much work they have done on their yards.  Luckily, we have nice neighbors (and patient too) and all of the comments have been positive (well, often full of advice, but still positive).  There was one older lady who askedy why we didn't leave the yard like it was, she liked it that way.  Can't please them all.

So, here is a pictoral history of the last year and a half  in our front yard.  I've included a picture of the final product at the beginning for those of you who don't want to slog through the whole process.

See, it turned out nice.  The plants are still pretty tiny, but they'll grow quickly with our nearly-year-round sunshine.

OK, this is what it looked like when we first looked at the house.  It looked great.  But after we signed the contract the owner stopped watering and the tenting for termites (required for home sales in CA) killed back most of the plants near the house.  And we discovered that the hedges and lawn were composed of at least 5 different kinds of plants/grass each.  So, it only looked good from a distance.  

This tree is an ornamental pear.  It had never been trimmed properly and the branches hung low over the driveway.  The roots were breaking up the sidewalk and heading toward the foundation of the house.  But it was pretty.

 So, we stopped watering (we had a $300 water bill because the cable install people had crushed a sprinkler pipe under the driveway when they installed a conduit and we decided we didn't want to spend any more money on plants we wanted to take out anyway.)  The scouts spent two Saturday mornings at our house tearing out hedges.  It was hard work.  And, we poisoned the grass.

 Then the digging started.  Chris excavated the sprinkler system which was way more work than we expected.  It was laid out crazy and the pipes were old and brittle and broke easily, and there are so many rocks in the soil that the digging had to be done by pickax.  That meant either Chris had to do all the digging, or spend a lot of time patching pipe that broke when I did the digging.

So much work.  Thanks Chris.

People would say to us, "You know you can hire people to do this?"  Really?

I dug out the Agapanthus (Lily of the Nile) that completely obscured a lovely landscaping rock.

We did get some help from the boys, but only one at a time.  Chris' grandpa used to say, "One boy is worth half a man.  Two boys are worth no man at all."  Or something like that.

Map of the yard for planning how much seed, mulch, and such was needed.

 After the sprinklers were done it was time to get the ground ready to plant grass.  We had gone back and forth on whether or not to take the eucalyptus tree out.  It was huge.  We had decided that we were going to keep it and just get it trimmed so it didn't blow over on the house.  It shaded the house in the afternoon keeping it cooler.

Rototilling (he rototilled twice to get the slope right.)

This drove me crazy.  The sod that was laid in the 70's used a plastic mesh that we had to keep pulling off the rototill blades.  This bundle was only a small part of what we pulled out.

 Of course, we had a storm come through the day after Chris rototilled that blew down hundreds of trees around town.  So, we needed a new plan for the front corner of the yard.

I like the way the water looks in the rototilled furrows.

One advantage of having high priests help instead of elders is that you are more likely to have access to someone with some good tools.

We had the stump ground up by a tree removal company.  All of the rest of the tree was collected by a neighbor for firewood, some that was left in the street was removed by the city, and we split the big slices of trunk for our own firewood.

 Then we seeded the lawn.

 Since I had the attention of the city (our eucalyptus tree blocked the street for a week) I had them take out the ornamental pear (because it was a city tree) and it was breaking up the sidewalk.

 Biggest problem with the corner now was that it was full of giant roots left by the tree and it was a steep slope down to the sidewalk.

 A lot of work went into moving dirt off the slope to make it more shallow and hacking out roots.

Nathaniel dug out a lot of dirt.  Davis moved it to the backyard in the garden cart.

The city planted a new tree - another ornamental pear.

Nathaniel and Davis take turns mowing the lawn and trimming the edges now.

 The next big project was to install exterior lighting.  That meant digging more trenches and patching more sprinkler pipe.

 We had quite a few large landscaping rocks scattered around the front and back yards that didn't look good where they were.  We used them to stabilize the hill on the corner.  The problem was moving them.  We had to use a winch to pull them onto a dolly or onto boards and drag them across the yard.

Two of the four largest  rocks in place and a giant root that we ended up burning out to get rid of. 

 Finally in December we were ready to put in landscaping plants.  We laid down a weed barrier covered with bark chips because we have put so much work into this yard already, and there is still the back yard to do, that I just don't think I'd have the energy to start pulling weeds after the winter rains.

 We planted different varieties of Agapantha, creeping lily, day lily, and iris under the ornamental pear tree.

The walk is bordered by Huechera (Coral Bells)

This is a sweet (or fragrant) olive.  These tiny white blossoms smell so good.  I put it by the front door so the fragrance will waft in on the afternoon ocean breeze.

White and pink tea trees.  A grizzled old man came up to me at the nursery when I was buying these and told me that the barbary pirates used to boil these leaves for tea.  Hmmm...

Against the wall to the back yard.

The reddish bark makes the rocks stand out better.

Some little succulents that look like rocks.

I wasn't feeling well, so I helped mostly by watching.

Our new little plants even survived some frost.

Root of All Evil

Do you remember this tree?
http://cagarners.blogspot.com/2011/04/story-of-eucalyptus-tree.html

Well, it has taken a very long time to clean up after it.  We moved rocks (really big rocks) from all over the front and back yards to stabilize the hill on the corner.  We used a winch, cable, a dolly, and boards to ski the rocks across the grass.  It was hard work and took a few weeks to actually get them all moved out front.

Davis helped us move rocks around the yard.

The rock "skis" across the grass while Chris cranks the winch.

Placing the biggest rocks first.

Building rock cairns with rocks that haven't been embedded in the hill yet.

While we were digging places to set the rocks we found huge roots left over from the eucalyptus tree.  We chopped, sawed, dug, and also tried to pull the roots out with the winch.  Crazy.  One root was not going to budge.  So, it was time to take drastic action.

 We banked the fire with rocks all around and covered the top with the grill cover so you couldn't see any flames from the road as it got dark.  We stayed outside watching it for a couple hours until the coals died down (it took a long time for the flames to settle down because the eucalyptus bark has a lot of oil in it).  While we were outside we saw a police patrol car drive by 4 times - each time from a different direction through the intersection.  Oh yeah, we didn't have a permit for this.  It was like they had received a call that someone in the neigborhood was building fires in their front yard...  So, either they never actually saw the fire, or they saw it was little and that we were watching it (from the front steps) so they didn't want to bother with it.  We ended up leaving it burning overnight.
  In the morning it was still smoking but the root had burned through enough that a couple of blows with the sledge hammer broke it off.  We thought we were getting off easy having the tree blow over in the storm and the city cleaning up most of it.  It took another day of digging to get all the auxilliary roots out so we could place the rocks.  Now we have to finish putting in the sprinklers around that area and then we can plant.  
  Nothing to do with the root - here's a picture of the new quilt Chris' mom made that we are "storing" on our bed (It's not good to have quilts folded for too long so it's best to lay them out flat and Carol didn't have room to lay this one out on a bed at her house.)  Isn't it great?



The story of the eucalyptus tree.

We had an old eucalyptus tree in the front yard.  We talked about taking it out.  We got a couple quotes from tree guys to trim it or take it out.  One guy told us when the tree hasn't ever been trimmed like this one that the branches catch the wind during a storm and blow the tree over.  "At least it is leaning toward the street," he said.   We decided to leave the tree in and just get it trimmed.  We didn't want to spend the money to take it out and it shaded the roof in the afternoon.

Eucalyptus tree on the corner of the yard

 That very Sunday we had a drenching storm with gusts of wind up to 60mph.  We were home in the afternoon.  Chris heard a gust of wind and a crunch.  He looked out and the tree was in the street.

Eucalyptus tree on the corner of the street

 A neighbor wanted the firewood so he and a buddy showed up with chainsaws the next week and cut up most of the major branches and took two pickup truck loads away.  Since it fell in the street, the city cleaned up the leafy branches and cut the trunk up to the property line.

Chris chipped away the dirt and bark so they could cut it with the chainsaw

 Then some ward members came to help cut the stump up.  Actually, a son-in-law of one of them who trains forest service guys in clearing trees came with his sharp chainsaw and pretty much did the whole thing himself.  Chris cleaned up the trunk where he wanted to cut (it keeps the saw sharp). 

This is as small as we could get the stump without paying someone to do the work.

 Then we were left with a giant dirt/root ball.  I got a couple of quotes from guys to get rid of it.  They all suggested crazy, labor intensive and expensive ways to get rid of it.  Then the first guy who told me it would probably fall in the street said he could just grind it away. (Why didn't any of the others say they could just grind it up?)  So, when we got back from our spring break trip it looked like this...

Stump has been ground up into mulch.

If you look close you can see a faint green sheen on the ground behind the wood chips.  Our 1 week old baby grass is growing.  Now we need to grade the slope on the corner and clean it up so we can plant some flowering bushes on the corner and a new tree above them.