May 2015 Landscaping Update

Ah, Spring! The winter is behind us, the days have been sunny and beautiful, sort of breezy and mild. I am delighted to be off the road and free of work for a spell, and I'm excited to get back to my much-neglected yard.

It appears that 2014 turned out to be a great year to almost completely ignore the yard and landscaping. At the edge of the parking lot is a tray of lariope that went unplanted and eventually died, along with a bottlebrush plant that also did not get planted, along with a rosemary bush that died that did not get planted. About all I accomplished was to keep the grass cut and to spray Roundup from time to time. Oh, I did manage to dig a huge hole where the front yard meets what I like to call The Grove, while extracting a diseased cherry tree's stump. It started simple but I didn't keep it simple:

Can you see here the old wall where the driveway used to be?

I did not get any pics of how deep and wide I eventually went with this hole.

Now that I stop and think back on it, I'm realizing that working on digging out all the roots from that stump, while simultaneously telling myself I was creating a better bed for some shrubs like azaleas and rhododendron, is part of what bogged me down last year during prime yardwork season. But I also seem to recall we had a pretty wet summer. And I traveled a lot...it was a full work calendar.

And I also went into mad-crazy-subcontractors-work-on-the-house mode as we moved into summer: porch repairs, chimney rebuild, plaster repair and restoration, mantles restoration, front door refinishing, floor refinishing...and I recall distinctly not wanting to be stuck in a yard project when I wanted to watch and/or support and/or monitor all that other work going on.

Not so for 2015! I am set and raring to go and have already gotten a lot accomplished in this first week or so off the road. I distributed the last of the old mulch pile last week and got a new load delivered:

The planting bed beside the parking lot and back door was nicely weeded by my sister back in March, but it was very much in need of rebuilding thanks to how much it had settled and sunk.

But I ran into a little problem regarding my load of topsoil, delivered a year ago but left completely untouched since then: the reeds that grow wild in that back corner of my lot (and the neighboring lot) are pervasive and insidious with their root systems, and they had managed to get into and completely throughout the entire 7 cubic yards of dirt:

And that means I had to sift and screen every single shovelful of topsoil before I could wheelbarrow it either to the sidebed or to the cherry stump hole in the front yard:

The final tally approached 60 wheelbarrow loads—each and every one screened and sifted—so the city yard waste cart was very nearly full of screened roots (shown at just the beginning of that accumulation here):

I finished up that pile on May 20th, and on May 21st, the next load of topsoil was delivered:

This time, though, I hope I've got a good barrier to prevent a repeat of that root invasion: there is a landscaping weed barrier layer, along with two tarps, and I'm going out with the shovel (once the rainy weather today clears) and make sure that there is no contact between the new pile and any ground or root source!