Deer me!

We had to dress our baby trees. Deer have been rutting and destroying the delicate bark of the trunk. I forgot to take a "before" picture of the two trees now covered up, but here is an example of a third, a tulip tree, that still needs wrapping. Stupid deer. Eating our bulbs and hostas and now this:

Both our precious new maples are now sporting these lovely plastic wraps to help protect them. Hopefully there's no permanent damage.

In other yard news, besides the constant battle with leaves, we have begun setting up for a vegetable garden! While this isn't exactly planting season, we figured it was a good time to start turning over the soil and building the gates (to protect from bunnies and deer as noted above).  This is really more a project for grandma and her grandbabies, so D and I didn't even have to do much of the work! Here you can see some straight lines made of string to help get the fencing straight followed by the completed garden. We also rototilled some of the soil, though we'll do another round this spring and have a truckload of compost delivered to help fertilize the area. I can't wait to send the kids out to bring back a crop.

And finally, we have new decorative grasses growing along our property line, also from grandma. They looked totally dead when we planted them (you can still see the brown dead grass blades), but the green grass and fronds popped out when we weren't paying attention and they are very much alive. We're hoping it forms a fence of sorts to separate us from the empty lot and give our backyard some privacy from the street.

A place for the sump to pump

Recently it became clear that the pipe that leads out of our sump pump and into our yard had become totally clogged. Water was sitting in the little well under the black grate. D tried to snake it with our 20' plumber snake and got nowhere. A professional plumber didn't do any better. 

The problem was that after the PVC pipe immediately jutting out of the little well, the pipe was all corrugated black drain pipe that can easily tear. So the snake may have just reached a curve and then broken through, or coiled on itself or who knows what. Likely the pipe itself got holes in it ages ago and slowly filled with dirt and debris. All we could figure out was that water wasn't draining.

D started out trying to find and unearth the black pipe but quickly realized that the path it took through our yard was curvy at best. He dug up a lot of grass and dirt trying to track it before we decided to cut our losses, abandon the black drain pipe, and start with a whole new path. This time he bought much sturdier PVC pipe, the same diameter as the short piece that was already there - 1.25''.

Then he dug a giant trench through our garden. I would have been sadder except that plot was a mess anyway. After years of attempting to grow lilacs there, beginning in 2011, trying to add more in 2013, and then significantly reducing their number in 2015, they're now pretty much gone (one of the newer tiny ones is still barely surviving in a corner). This gave D a lot of space to dig.

Here it is from the other direction:

He tried to angle the trench so that it got deeper as it moved away from the house, but it is mostly just level. The pumping water from the sump ought to keep it moving though. Then he bought a special two-compound epoxy to attach the pipes together to each other (with a junction).

After that, it was just a matter of filling in all that dirt. No small task of course, but it's finally done now. The garden isn't as awful as you'd think from all that digging, but it will need a refresh in the spring. At least now the water is flowing, which is good since we're having a wet fall. That sump pump has been working hard and now the water can get out.