Belated Back Yard Update

Haven't posted for awhile.  Things have been busy for D and I both personally and professionally.  Oh, and we've also both been stricken with pretty gruesome cases of poison ivy.  

But full schedules and itchy rashes notwithstanding, we've made time for work around the yard.  With how crappy the yard used to look, I think we've made real progress.  

Remember this?  This was in the beginning.  The vine orgy.

note the overgrown mess of honeysuckle strangling the mulberry in the back

Fantastic tangle of dead crap left in mounds for us to clean up 

We cleaned up the dead vine remnants.  Then D removed the vintage, rusty laundry pole.

 This is what it looked like this spring  

We planted grass seed, and some weeds popped up.

 Transplanted hostas from the front.  

And they are being eaten by slugs.  Swiss cheese here.

I've tried beer traps, but using homebrew must be a mistake, because the beer traps are always empty.

It's not perfect, but its green and the lumber has been moved.  

The grass grew in very well at the base of the tree, and quickly too.  

I think the giant elephant-ear sized leaves look like rhubarb, but I haven't actually identified them.  If they are, they can stay.  If they are not rhubarb, they are outta here.

I planted another hosta and a second astilbe.  I need to mulch this area, but just haven't got around to it.  The lily has already bloomed.  It looks like it too made a successful transplant.  

And on the other side of the yard, the tree branches from the honeysuckle felled by my husband the were left to dry out along with whatever vine was strangling that tree here.  D chopped that down with an ax.

This side of the yard was pretty hideous for a few weeks.

:: wince ::

 The day finally came when the branches were dried enough to be (relatively) easily stripped down to be put into the yard waste bins for collection. 

 It was around this time that I got poison ivy

After hours outside stripping branches, I'd barely made a dent.

even with bobby's help

 D made a more orderly and controlled lumber pile.  Using 2 concrete sidewalk squares left intact from the concrete removal on the side of the house to raise the pile up off the ground to keep them dry, and four rebar poles.  We'll be covering the lumber pile with a tarp to keep the burn pile dry.  

And D spent a third afternoon breaking down more branches,
and this is what it looks like now.  Eh?

One more time.

Before:  

After:  

Cincy Chainsaw Massacre

D had developed himself a taste for wielding chainsaws.  Now it is true that D hated this tree and this shrub, and has said so ever since we bought the house.  It is also true that D didn't hate them nearly as much as our neighbors did.  But I think that he also just really wanted to swing a chainsaw again.  

Honeysuckle had nearly taken over a tree and a shrub in the backyard.  These photos don't do justice to the foofy mess it was.  In fact the first photo is one I took only after D began slicing messy bits off with a borrowed chainsaw (thanks dad).  And I can't find a before photo of the shrub at all.  But you can get an idea for the giant mess it creates to fell a tree in your backyard.   

*photo quality isn't great.  this was at dusk and the light changed constantly.  

I am continuously carrying away branches at this point

Piles of branches like this

Which we dragged over to the side of the yard into a pile so high the neighbor's garage has almost vanished.

he's lovin it

I'm a lumberjack!

Under all that honeysuckle there was a tree that I misidentified.  I had remembered the elder neighbor talking about how this yard had had an olive tree in it.  Well, the leaves are so obviously different that we knew right away that this was not the same tree.  We used a website to help identify the leaves by their shape and variegation and whatnot, and discovered that we have ourselves a mulberry tree.  

The mulberry tree that remains

It leans quite a bit.  We're not sure if this tree can survive either.  But we'll wait and see. 

And there was a shrub here that was so big, that it blocked the view of the neighbor's house almost entirely. But in a Wild Kingdom overgrown sort of way.  I don't mind the screening effects of plants.  In fact, even though the yard does look more tidy, if I'm perfectly honest,  I miss it a bit.  I feel ... exposed.  

ehhh....

We always had to get rid of it because the plan was to plant a vegetable garden.  But still... we look out of our back windows and see neighbors.  

Before

ehhh...