Bamboo

Summer is transforming itself with some deception. I know from experience (or at least I think I know) what will happen if I attempt to do any serious work outdoors in July and August. But now the rains have started. Yesterday a nice cool one soaked me as I was planting the new sun-loving bamboo that should do well along the fence and should help hide the power pole out back. The quick flash of rain had me shivering when I came in to the air conditioning.

Cheryl got me a great book on Japanese garden design. It's got my head swimming with all sorts of ideas, of wandering stone paths and Feng Shui and complexity and simplicity, except that all these ideas require work to implement. And July is here.

We've also got four new trees in the back yard, sitting in pots until we find the right spots for them. Here's our Calamondia orange.

In the master project schedule for the backyard, it's OK to get these plants now because they are out of the way and won't be disturbed by the hardscaping to come, such as the French drain I'll need to make below the patio (which now puddles up during a rain). The yard will be a mess for months to come.

Also last week we put in 4 new giant bird of paradise alone the fence.

Ha, no heat stroke yet.

Here's another of the new trees: a Kaffir lime.

Am I tougher than the summer? Maybe this year I am.

Not What the Mayans Would Do

Continuing on with the long and painful process of converting our former jungle into a less-jungly place, yesterday I tackled the area by the outdoor oven, a place that had become covered with weeds and vines to the point that the stone patio had disappeared, not unlike some of the Mayan ruins that we visited in the Yucatan, overgrown from centuries of neglect, except in our case it has only taken a few years.

No, this patio was not designed with the skill and foresight of Mayan engineers. Whoever put down these stone did so in a hurry and without regard for the future--no real drainage is accounted for, so in just a few years the rain waters have deposited a layer of Florida soil on top. Adventurous roots found a way to grip onto the stones and create their own layer of earth.

A row of ferns lines the patio to the left, several of which were growing directly on top of the stones. I severed these from the main group by cutting the roots with garden shears. Once the roots were cut I was able to pull away the thick mat of tiny roots covering the stones for about two feet, very much like a fibrous door mat about 2 inches thick.

Ferns will cover the planet after humans are gone--they are by far the biggest bullies in our yard.

Then on to the rest of the area, pulling the weeds one at a time from between the stones, checking with my shears to see when I was on top of stone or not. I swept away the dirt and weeds and then attempted to wash off newly revealed patio. I didn't even realize that the stones extended all the way to the picnic table (on the right). Of course, I couldn't really wash them because the water just puddled.

Unless I redo this patio, it will get eaten up by the jungle again, and very soon. This whole area needs to be elevated several inches so that water will run of quickly. Worse, the low spot is currently the air hole that feeds the oven--if a storm comes up while I'm smoking something, the water will just rush into that hole.

All I need is a ton or two of sand...

Next: setting up our new fruit trees.

Making My Own Post Caps

Post caps can cost $20 or more each, and I had 16 posts to cap. I spent less on my first car. So, not that I am cheap or anything, I felt motivated to make my own post caps.

To start, Home Depot doesn't sell pressure-treated trim molding--I would have to make my own. A few years ago I made the pine molding in our guest room, and I was very happy with the notion of doing it again. Molding makes me happy (which is perfectly normal). I have a router table just for this purpose.


I routed out long strips of pine, and got enough molding from one piece of fencing (about $1.30, not that money had anything to do with it). Then I cut them into little picture-frame pieces, all exactly the same size (well, not exact at the molecular level, but close, possibly a few atoms one way or the other).


Then I taped the pieces together and rested them on back of the post cap top that I cut with my table saw. From one 2 x 6 (about $2.70, not that I care), I got 16 tops.


Cute. This keeps the frame square.


Then I centered the frame on the cap and fastened it with 8 nails. I wanted to use my nail gun but couldn't find stainless steel brad nails. Total nail cost: 48 cents (or 49).


Here's the assembled cap, with some pine knots on the top. Yes, I could have skipped over the knots, but that would have cost me 75 cents or more, and I'm not crazy. Besides, the pine knots add character.


Then I had to cut the posts down to size. I cut one, then put up a cap temporarily and asked Cheryl what she thought. "You want them that low?" she asked, but having already cut the post, it was too late for the others to be any higher. I thought they should be a little lower, so we are now both disappointed.

One by one I pressed the caps into place with a big glop of exterior construction glue (about $2.25 total).


Total project time: about 4 hours. Total cost: I don't care.

We only did the posts in back. The side-yard posts are still about 8 feet tall, and we're planning to run wires between them and coax some pretty vines to grow on them.

Next: landscape plan

Zombie Landscaping

The clearing of trees has a single-minded thrust and wide-angled lens. I was determined to finish up this weekend, determined to clear-cut the yard and be finished with it. Normally I would take each plant into consideration and have some sympathy for it before I yank it from the earth, but this weekend I approached the yard with a zombie's sense of compassion and determination.

And this was no small number of trees. We had literally thousands of trees, though most of them were no bigger than a small weed, which is what cherry laurel trees are--weeds that spread underground, one of Florida's most invasive plants (not that I can be forgiven for what I've done). Only about 20 or 30 of these trees were too big for the lawn mower, and only about 10 were bigger than about 3 inches in diameter.

Of course, I had already decapitated them a week ago, leaving about 5 feet of trunk as a lever to help get out the roots. Have these plants been in agony this past week? Probably.


Cherry laurel roots run out laterally from the base of the tree. They typically don't have a tap root that grows straight down, like an oak. So my task was to uncover the main side roots, cut them with an ax, and then wiggle the trunk until it comes out. I discovered that these roots were often as big as the trunk. Cutting just the trunk would have been easier, but this would have left a visible trunk, and I never wanted to see these guys again.


With the trunks out of the way, I was able to run my lawn mover, and now we have a typical Florida oak hammock, waiting to be filled with new plants. Hopefully the new plants won't ever learn of the violence done here or of the zombie monster that did it.

Big Jaws

The clearing of brush and stumps continues, and I have already moved an incredible amount of limbs and vines to the curb, so much stuff that knew I would be cursed by the city workers when they had to pick it all up.

In our previous house, which is only about two miles away, we had to put everything into plastic bags or the trash people would not pick it up. But here, and I'm not quite sure why, we can just pile our stuff at the curb. I've had big piles of stuff before, but this was the mother of all piles--three big piles, each more than 6 feet tall.

On Friday when I heard a big truck outside I ran to get my camera and peeked through the upstairs window, careful not to let them see me, because I am a coward and ashamed of the big mess I had made. I expected to see a small army of people working on the pile and hating me for it, but by the time I got my camera ready, the piles were already gone. All I saw was a large mechanical arm and a set of 8-foot steel jaws. I was amazed as it crushed and ate a pile in one bite, picking it up and dropping it into the truck with no effort at all, all before I had time to take a picture.


Two or three more bites, and it was done.


I'm only half done with the stumps but at least I don't have to worry about trash guys anymore.

Next: removing stumps

Clearing the Jungle

I have a nice little hand saw for cutting limbs and small trees. It can rip through a baseball bat size tree limb in about 30 seconds. Early this morning I took it to the side yard to see how much jungle I could remove. The area has be left to nature for at least 15 years, maybe much longer, overgrown with cherry laurel trees growing at an angle to reach some light, and infested with vines that grown well up into the two big oak trees.

One type of vine is very thick, and maybe it is a tree of some kind because it has branches and is very tough, but it grows in all directions, and I never noticed before today that these things have grown up 30 or 40 feet into the oaks, and they refuse to be pulled out. What the heck are those things?



After a few hours of hand sawing, I decided it was time for the neighbors to wake up, and I brought out my big chain saw and now I have a pile of brush about 4 feet deep, 80 feet wide and 80 feet long. The two citrus trees that finally died are also gone now. I've left all the stumps up to about 5 or 6 feet because, as I recently discovered, this makes them easier to remove.


Then a break for lunch, and then I spent 3 hours of moving brush to the curb, until the heat would not allow me to walk another step, and I only got a small part of the yard cleared out. I have enough limbs and brush remaining to line the entire street in front of the house. But not today.

Now we can see one neighbor's garage and the other's guest house. Oh well.


Next: Removing stumps