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Monday, April 23, 2007

border patrol

In a move that's sure to upset the masses, we've taken down the border with our neighbors to the north. We were initially fearfull of a mass imigration and have since taken steps to secure our status as a sovergn lot:

This weekend Mark finally won his battle with the hedge and did it all without a winch, bobcat, chainsaw, dynamite, truck or anything else fun and efficient. After uprooting the last of the giant hedges we pulled out the chicken wire fence and opened the borders. We also removed a lone fence pole that technically probably belonged to the neighbors, but we doubt they knew or cared. If you're the neighbors and reading this, we didn't remove it, it fell and we didn't want the safety hazard so we're storing it in the dumpster out back. please recover your post and we'll put it back in.

The old hedge left us a lot of leaf litter, bird poo and other good fertalizer and despite the amount of stuff we removed we were left with a significant mound of dirt. We tilled (with a shovel) all of it in and smoothed out the yard and it looks great. After preping the dirt we replaced the fence with a do-it-yourself stake in thing from the depot. It looks surprisingly good, but Mark has serious doubts about its ability to stay standing for any amount of time. The fence spikes go somewhere between 6 and 8 inches into the ground. seems like 2 feet would be a better distance.



After resecuring the property we planted three fun little bushes that are supposed to be evergreen, except for the leaves are yellow (not sure how that math works). The important part is that they're not coniferous - or carniverous (but that would be fun). We accented the bushes with some ground cover plants and hope to get more soon.




We really wanted to xeriscape that area but surprisingly home depot's new "Eco Friendly" plant selection didn't include a single thing native to the state or anything that requires less than super regular watering. We're not sure why this is surprising since all of the other Eco friendly options in the store are petroleum based fertilizers and plastic fences....perhaps "Eco" is a BP spinoff that we don't know about.

Anyway, the little side yard looks lovely and hopefully makes the house a little nicer throughout. It was a fun project outside of the hedge removal.

Next week Mark's real Xeriscape garden gets here. Stay tuned for photos of lots of flowers and greenery. We're out to prove that low water doesn't mean thorny plants and rocks.

1 Comments:

At 8:28 PM, Blogger joeandjoy.com said...

I miss the hedge already... boo hoo hoo...

 

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