Making leaf piles and measuring things

This morning I continued processing the cut branches for leaves and twigs. That was about three hours of work. There are still more branches to process. It turns out the two trees I’m about to cut down are willow trees. The wood is truly beautiful.

I discovered this morning that the very large tree in the yard is leaking some kind of fluid. I think it’s sap. It was brownish and quite watery. I discovered it by accident on the ground. I looked up and there was a dark streak down one of the branches.

A friend of ours (spouse and I) was visiting for the weekend and pointed out that all the sunlight falls on the paved patio, rather than the grass portion where I’ve put the garden beds. The first garden beds are on the corner of the patio, the most recent garden beds are farther out in the sunlight and actually get light. So we had a discussion and make some sketches about how to lay out the back yard with the paved section removed.

This afternoon I worked on trimming the bushes in the front of the house. I followed the tree pruning rule and took out new growth only up to 1/3 of the height of the bush. I also snipped the trimmings into compost. The bushes look better. I found vines growing amonst several plants, so I took out the vines. They’ll be back. Makes me realize I need to keep up with mulching the tree/bush beds.

Something’s eating the roses. I need to plant companion plants. After research, I’ll plant garlic, lavender, chives, marigolds, parsley, alyssum. I’m going to get rid of the succulent bush. I’m not sure what it’s doing, environmentally speaking.

I finally put the strawberry plant in dirt today. I put it in the planter alongside the house. I found there were four separate plants in the one bush I bought, so I separated them all and planted them with about a foot and a half distance between. Let’s see what happens.

I measured the front and side of the property today. There is a lot of square footage and a lot of space for fruit trees and things that grow in mulch. On one side of the porch the soil is pretty bad, it was mulched in the past but hadn’t been mulched probably in two years. There’s a very dry-looking bush that is coming back very very slowly. It’s been heavily pruned for years, with the remains of suckers all from the root system.

Bought an electric chainsaw in anticipation of tree cutting tomorrow. Not sure of the best time – going plant shopping at 10, and don’t want to wake the neighbors too early in the day on this long weekend. 😉

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