Baby Steps in the Backyard

What was intended to be a break from the basement that lasted a month or two turned into a full-fledged summer vacation.  Summer was what summer should be - gardening, long family weekends, vacation, grilling, and baseball.  We didn't ignore the house completely, though.

I should also note that this summer's CSA experience ended with a whimper rather than a bang.  Things got really busy in August, so we weren't cooking as much as I might have liked.  Our CSA farm also suffered extensive flood damage as a result of heavy rains in SW Wisconsin, so the boxes got a bit smaller.  There's really nothing to say about the last few weeks, so I won't.  We're probably still on board for next year, though.  (And they might be starting a cheese program - that's my kind of community agriculture!)

In preparation for what we hope will be next summer's big patio, fence, and regrading project, we made a couple of changes in the backyard.  Be forewarned - they're less than glamorous.

One of the trees in our yard suffered an untimely death last summer.  We went through a week of temperatures over 100 in July or so, and all of the leaves dropped.  You could almost hear a "whoomph," it happened so fast.  The arborist we had investigate said that the roots had curled around themselves, essentially choking the tree to death.  So that's a cautionary tale - make sure to break the roots up and spread them out really wide when you're planting trees and shrubs.

Here's the tree, as it looked this summer.  Dead indeed.

So we bit the bullet and had a tree service come out and cut it down.  This had the unanticipated benefit of slowing the stream of guys coming to our door and asking if they could cut down our tree.  Maybe we're just over-cautious, but letting a total stranger with no references come onto our property and operate heavy machinery just doesn't sound like a good plan.  There seem to be plenty of people who think that they'll make some money that way, though. 

The yard feels pretty naked now.  Eventually we'll have a privacy fence put up, and we plan to plant a few lilacs close to the fenceline.  For now, I just feel exposed.  The stump will be ground down in a few weeks, so at least we get some free wood chips out of the deal.

We also had our air conditioner replaced and moved to the corner of the yard.  I don't know quite when the old one had been installed, but it had olive green plastic trim, which makes me think it was at least as old as I am.  The real problem, though, was that it was installed right in the middle of the back of the house, making any sort of patio installation a problem.  When we had our landscape plan drawn up, the designer placed a patio on the corner of the house.  That was great, except that anyone sitting on the patio in summer would have loud AC noise directly behind them.  When the system started to take six hours to cool the house by about 4 degrees, we decided it was the perfect time to get the darn thing replaced and moved.

There's a lot of painting and tidying up that will need to be done, but at least everything is in the right place now.  You can see the location of the old AC unit just to the right of the hose.  The new location will be much better for everyone.

So, things still look a bit patchy, but we are READY for the men with the bulldozers to come and make our backyard an inviting green paradise, a sylvan glade in the city, a refreshing private oasis!

Now, about the cash for the men with bulldozers...