Yard Progress

 Jason's new hobby is our yard. He's always researching what to plant, where to plant, and when to plant. Mostly for grass seed, but also for ground covering, trees, and our garden. Our yard was pretty damaged from all the work done on our house last summer and all the rain that fell during that time. Plus, we had years of neglect when we just didn't have the time or resources to take care of it the best that we could. Not that we have any more time now, but with Jason working from home and kids that are older, we just do it anyway. 

For years we've been talking about taking down the huge sycamore tree in our yard. Though we love trees and all the beauty and good they provide, this one was just more of a burden than anything. It dropped sticks all through the year, (like crazy amounts of sticks), the leaves never turned a beautiful fall color, just brown, and they were so big that they were hard to suck through the mulcher and they smothered everything they covered. The leaves also didn't finish falling until mid -January or even February, when everything is either frozen or covered in snow. They don't even pick up yard waste after the first week in December, so we're often storing leaves from rakings we do in December when the weather isn't as freezing, until the first week in April when they pick up yard waste again. The other thing we realized that was a problem is that it was so big it was shading everything else and stunting the apple trees' growth, among other things. 

This is after they cut away the first 5 or 6 huge branches, in February.

They took a break for some bad weather and came back a week or two later.

We were sad to chop it down, but now that the stump is gone, we're so happy! It also makes the sunroom sunnier! We found out that it was over 100 years old! That's kind of cool. I kept thinking of Pocohantus' song Colors of the Wind when she sings, "How high does a sycamore grow?..." Well, ours grew very high and it lived a very long life.

After the stump was out, we decided to take out the cement border from around this area. It turned out that there was not only cement around it on top but buried at least 2 feet in the ground below! So we just kept on digging and finding new pieces of cement. Not to mention huge roots that Jason hacked away at. It was a tough project!

This is it now. If you look very closely, you can see our little evergreen, a Norwegian Spruce, that Austin got a few years ago at school. We moved it over here because one day it will be pretty big and it will take up the whole corner. We made sure to measure that it won't shade our sunroom!

That spruce was where the apple tree is on the right and that apple tree was near where the spruce is now. Eventually, we'll take out the arborvitae tree in between those apple trees. They can grow better now because they won't be shaded by the sycamore.

All that beautiful mulch in the back there is our sycamore tree stump. It's about inches thick there. ( I should have gotten a close shot, but I didn't feel like going outside just now. It's so cold again that I can't take it anymore and can't just stand outside.)

Currently, Jason is getting the yard ready to overseed, and in some cases to seed, since we have some places that are totally bare. That's why we had to put the extra pavers in when we did. The garden plots need to be replaced anyhow and we also want them by the sunroom, but we have to prep that area so we can take them apart and move the dirt over into the new beds he's making. The old garden area will then be bare and ready to plant grass seed.

Here's where the garden beds are now, You can see the one behind Kai has no front, it rotted off!

Here's the new one Jason's been working on in the garage, with good wood from our old deck. 

Mother Nature has been so accommodating during this time, NOT! It was in the 80s over the weekend and has been about 45 degrees colder this week. Not to mention all the rain we got, including over the weekend, even though it was hot, there was standing water everywhere!! Jason's been a trooper and continuing on with his plan to overseed on May 7, despite the weather.