A Tale of Three Trees

We have a new member of the family - 10 days ago, a Zelkova errata arrived in our yard, to one day create some of the shade lost when our white oak was removed. We didn't want another white oak because they are very slow growing (we are impatient) and can grow to be gigantic, as we knew from experience, which would not work well in this new home across the driveway from the old one. And honestly I don't think I'll miss the acorns and baby oaks (or the leaves, at least for a while - this year our front yard is so  empty compared to previous autumns). And so here is our little zelkova, may she grow big and strong.

In other tree news, our hawthorn did what it was supposed to and turned a lovely shade of orange with bright red berries.

I've been busily spending my evenings - or at least my evenings until we set our clocks back and it got too dark - pulling out more ivy from the backyard. I forgot a "before" picture but I think the giant circle of brown makes it pretty clear where the ivy used to be. We tilled the soil and put some grass seed down, though it might be too late for this year.

It's been a long time since I worked on this - 2011 according to this post. After clearing so much of the yard, the last little circle just wasn't that annoying. But now I'm ready to convert the whole thing to grass (with a little bare soil/mulch around the tree). With a little one who wants to run around and play in the yard, we might as well get as much yard as we can. Plus the tree will probably be a lot happier without being choked by ivy.

Speaking of little one, we got behind with leaf clean up when it seemed last week like the trees dropped all the leaves at once. She kindly agree to help us out:

No surprises here, but we didn't get very far. These leaves are definitely a multi-day process.

Big Project, Big Improvement

We've been quietly getting quote for a big project around here that I haven't told you about. And now that the work is finished, I can show the big reveal. Can you guess what's going on from this picture?

Here's some white space, so I don't spoil any attempts to guess
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We took the plunge and had the back of our lot completely cleared out!

I'll cut right to the before and after pictures and then go into the details:

After 5 years almost exactly (September 15), we finally decided to hire help to clear out our back yard. We were making progress on the smaller sections of overgrowth, like here and here and here (small is relative - they made up a huge portion of the yard). We always wanted to clear away the triangular section in the back. We hired someone in the fall of 2012 to clear it out, but they mostly just hacked it down to the ground, without removing much at the roots. That might have been ok if we had been willing to maintain it, but it grew back so quickly we couldn't keep up. Plus there was a lot of poison ivy and poison sumac in there.

We realized late last month that if we wanted to clear it away and put grass down this year, now was the time to do it (late summer/early fall is the time to put down grass seed). So we scrambled to get some quotes and, despite the high cost, committed to getting this done. After 5 years of saying we would "get to it eventually" we realized that if we hadn't done it before we had a baby, now post-baby we would never get around to it.

I think we made a good decision. It took 4 qualified people almost 2 days to clear everything out. Imagine 2 inexperienced people trying to do it while watching a baby....not gonna happen. First they pulled up everything manually (because they were going to plant grass seed immediately, they couldn't rely on chemicals  - which worked out well because I didn't really want them to use chemicals anyway). 

Originally we planned to leave some ivy under the trees, since it's too shady there for grass. But we decided to have them remove that too, because - as we learned previously - it's hard to maintain ivy and not have it take over. So they got rid of it and put down mulch.

They also got rid of the small tree stump leftover from this project. They didn't take the stumps out from the larger trees - it wasn't worth it since they are in the back corner and would cost a lot to remove.

They brought in some topsoil to level everything out, and then laid down mulch (under trees), grass, and hay. The weather have been very helpful and light sprinkles everyday has meant we haven't had to water yet.

Here are some more before, during, and after pictures taken from our second story.

You can't even see the little wood stove in this picture:

Here we are after day one, before we decided to pulled the additional ivy from the right-side. We're keeping it along the back as a privacy screen from the neighboring parking lot. It ends at a cement pad (which we realized one it was uncovered was a lot bigger than we thought - plenty of room for some lawn furniture), so hopefully that will help control the spreading. Maybe eventually we can plant something back there.

And here's the final picture. Hopefully the grass grows well. We have been seeing a lot of birds back there trying to eat the seeds.

Honestly I don't think we realized how much yard we had. It's been so overgrown since we bought the place that it was hard to visualize. It turns out this is about a third of our yard. It will be nice one the baby is walking to not have to keep her away from that section. And now there's plenty of room for a future swing set!

We also had the landscapers aerate the lawn (the real way, by removing giant plugs, and not by making spikes in the ground like the last people we hired - we were very clear about that), but I wasn't home to get a picture of that, unfortunately. They did the front and the back and then over seeded the front.

EXTERMINATE!!!!!

Like the Daleks, can you really destroy English Ivy? Well, yes you can. But if you tolerate it near your house it will continually attempt to overtake it. 

Eventually we will remove all of the ivy, but it is useful to to hold our soil in place until we have a better plan.

So every year we need to rip it off of our walls. 

A little more lawn

Since we bought this place two and a half years ago, we've been slowly conquering some of our back yard from the ivy and ground cover gone wild. Especially now that the front yard looks halfway decent, we thought we should spend a little more time in the back.

Yesterday we took advantage of a beautiful day (and rain in the forecast) to clear away this mess from near our patio and plant some grass seed.

 Isn't it nasty? I'm not sure you can tell from this picture but some of the weeds were almost 4 feet high (and that after mowing it a couple times last fall).

With our feline overlord watching from the house (and meowing his displeasure occasionally), we got to work.

Fortunately nothing will ever seem quite so hard as liriope or English ivy and since this had none of the former and only a little of the latter, we made quick progress. Here's where we were after a little under two hours. Even though we don't like the stuff around the trees (mostly Japanese spurge with some ivy thrown in), we don't know what we eventually want to use as ground cover. So for now we kept a small ring of it around the tree to deal with later.

Fast forward another hour or so and we had the soil tilled and mixed with compost and grass seed down (and covered and watered).

Here's an overhead shot--it already looks so much better and the grass isn't even growing yet. I don't know why we didn't clear this area out sooner.

Of course nothing comes without a price. Apparently despite gardening gloves and generally good practices, D woke up to discover mild painful and itchy poison ivy this morning on his arms and legs. Thank goodness for Tecnu!

Reclaiming Our Land

Let's review where we're at with our backyard ivy project. I'm just a little late getting around to posting everything because once the mosquitoes came out in full force, we haven't touched the yard at all. So we stopped work by early June and the latest picture below is from late June, once we got the grass to come up. But it's still impressive, even if a tad delayed.

First, a refresher on last fall:

By October, we had ripped out about 50 square feet of ivy and managed to get grass to grow in its place:

The leafy trees in the foreground are lilac bushes that were really languishing from lack of sunlight and invasive ivy. Since they weren't happy there and I wasn't happy having them there (they were right in the middle of the area I wanted to clear and open up), it was time for them to go.

Here's a better picture so you can see them (you can see that these pictures are all from very different seasons by the flowering tree on the right, which is totally bare in the pictures above--it's in the top left--and full and leafy down below):

My parents and D got the lilacs moved to the front while I cleared a giant swathe of ivy from where they used to be. Then it was time to plant grass seed. Meanwhile I kept working at the ivy--you can see below that we got some new grass but there are still some bare patches where I continued to push the ivy back.

Here's the final picture for the year: no lilac bushes, no bare patches, lots and lots of grass where the ivy used to be. Of course the rest of the yard is a mess and we still have a lot of work, but I'm proud of our reclaimed land--probably about 200 square feet that we didn't used to have!

There is still a little ivy under the tree but that will be easy to remove come fall. And all without weed killer!

Plants for a Healthy Home

Interior decorating advice, feng shui, environmentalists, and common sense all suggest that we should add more greenery to our home. Having plants inside can improve air quality, create a calming ambience, and help fill in empty corners.

One problem: we can't seem to find any cat friendly ones.

As I mentioned before in this post, our green cleaning guide lists 7 plants that contribute to good air quality and 6 are toxic. The remaining plant, spider plant, will basically make a cat high (an effect that our black and white cat once discovered and within a day, we had only a tiny little nub of spider plant yet, since he had devoured most of it). We use this ASPCA site for guidance on plant toxicity.

We even ignored the advice, since it seemed our cats ignored the Devil's Ivy (also known as Golden Pothos) plant that we've had for years (it comes from a cutting off a plant that has lived about as long as I have--seriously, this plant and its offspring will live for all eternity).

But when we recently lowered it off a top shelf to a lower shelf on our TV unit, our cats became pretty ill. It took a few weeks for me to realize that they were nibbling on the leaves.

In fact, it seems to me that just about every house plant--at least the common ones sold at Ikea and Home Depot--seem toxic. So besides hanging the plants from the ceiling out of reach of the cats, we need some new suggestions. Do you have pets and plants? What kinds of house plants should we bring into our home*?

*Caveat: I kill pretty much everything, so bonus points for any suggestions that are also hearty.

Tug-of-War

We spent much of September trying to clear up some of the ivy that has infested our backyard and threatened to eliminate what little grass we have. It was a multi-day and multi-trash-can project (ivy cannot be composted so it, like bamboo, has to be included in the regular trash and not the yard waste).

How did we do it? Well, we generally hate using chemicals for tasks we can do with a little muscle, so muscle is what we used. First, D took the lawn mower to it, to get rid of the surface leaves and make it easier to get to the vines.

Then the real fun began! Pulling up ivy is a lot like playing tug-of-war with the ground.  Find a vine (or 10 or 20) and PULL! It's quite a work-out. We did a lot of work reaching down into the dirt to find hidden runners, so I'm pretty confident that the part we "cleared" really is clear. For now, anyway.

(I spent a few fun afternoons doing this before D got home. I figured it substituted for a more traditional workout.)

Each time we cleared a swath, D would finish things up by rototilling it (thanks Mom and Dad for the rototiller!). We worked really hard for a few weeks during a dry spell and then decided it was time to lay down some grass seed just before the forecast called for rain. Here's how far we got:

The ivy continues under the tree and to the left, but we've sort of lost steam and moved on to other projects, especially because it's gotten wet and pulling up ivy through mud doesn't sound very appealing. At least we've recovered some lawn.

Here's the lawn this morning--you can see that we've successfully grown some grass! D just overseeded it last week to fill in some of the gaps.

Thanks to this project, I've discovered that I don't hate working outside, I just hate growing things. I'm pretty good at destruction though. So I'll leave the seeding and planting to D and continue to rip up the stuff we don't like. More to come, once the yard dries out.

In other outdoor news, we have a few mystery plants. Can you identify them?

Here's a pretty flowering plant we have in our back yard. It's obviously a late-summer/early-fall bloomer and loves shade, since it's in the shade of the house all day. I'd like to buy more or learn how to split it up, to put it in a few other shady spots:

And last, our border grass seems to have grown berries! What?! Do you know what this is all about?