First Shovelfuls

Last week on Sunday evening, we took out the hose to soak the ground at the back of the yard, preparing for our first transplant.

Patrick has started demolishing the small retaining wall and will soon be knocking rocks and concrete onto the old roses there, so we're moving them for their own safety. We started with preparing the new spot for it - digging into the soil for the first time, we were very happy with what we saw. After watering the area and preparing to dig a very difficult hole, I stood on our shovel for the first time and experienced something I've never experienced at my parents' house in Antioch. As I half-jumped on the shovel, I sunk nearly a foot down into the ground. Now, this area of California is prone to highly clay soil and our yard is no different. Over the past year I have been digging holes out in Antioch but I've just found out that the clay there and the clay here is very very different. Antioch being quite a bit inland compared to our new house, the clay is extremely compact and dense. But in our yard, it literally took only five minutes to dig a 2'x2'x1' hole for my mature rose (and that because I'm weak). The soil here must be well mixed with sand from the coast (maybe 2 miles away), because while it is still very much clay, it is infinitely softer than the stuff in Antioch.

The hole ready, we carefully tied the long gangly branches of the middle rose, an orange red one, and pried it up out of the ground. Not too difficult, I think we got most of the roots. Then, Patrick grabbed the base and carried it over to the hole and we firmly planted our first plant.

The next night, of course, I went over to the house and see that the rose is horribly wilted. So I soaked and soaked and soaked it again and will be back to check on it tonight. It hasn't been particularly hot so I hope it will perk up in the next couple days.

I also planted my first home grown plants. I started a lot of seeds in our condo this past winter and now, the ones that survived, are mostly trying to break out of their pots. My first selection was my Coreopsis. This winter was the first time I ever started seeds and these Coreopsis were my very first flowers from seed. Here are some pictures of my darlings slowly growing up.

And here they are in their new home.

I figure we'll start with a planting bed here in the back of the yard, slowly widening the non-crab grass and weed-free patches. I know that I should actually remove the grass and weed areas even farther from the plants than above but ugh, it's tiring getting that shovel through the weedy root zone and into the clay below. With each shovelful, we pretty much rip three inches off the top of the soil and throw it to the side to get rid of the weeds and roots. We're making a fair pile of castaways. I think we'll make a mound out of them in the back of the bed and eventually plant a shrub on top of it. Maybe a Ceanothus or a Redbud.

Lemons, Blackberries, and Roses

Popping by the house last night, I was finally able to remember to take some pictures (after going back to the car for the camera). Like I wrote last week, I decided to let Patrick take off some limbs on the lemon tree. I did the supervising as he would have just cut off too much if he was in charge and we didn't cut far enough down on the major limbs because we don't have a small enough saw. But there's still a noticeable difference.

First

Second

Third

So... the tree has shrunk quite a bit... In fact, it looks just plain odd in person but it's better off for it. Now, you might say that from these pictures, we've butchered the tree but it has been so badly pruned so many times that those big side branches were corkscrewing their way into the canopy and completely tangled with all the other branches. We'd actually like to take off the one remaining side branch as well but that's probably half the remaining canopy. It will fill in more in the next year if we take care of it and prune a bit more the badly crossing branches but I don't know if we will. Patrick is more than ready to just chop it down. But I've decided that we have to plant some other trees before we can remove the lemon. I think we'll start with three trees - one near the back left corner, one nearly centered on the back fence and one a bit in front of the roses on the left side (moving the roses eventually as well as the wall).

Something else we'll be removing eventually are the blackberry brambles. We've cut away all the little start ups around the main stand already but I'm telling Patrick again to leave the bush for a bit longer. There are hundreds of little red and green berries on it, ripening up and as they look so nice, I say we have to wait until their all ripe and picked before we cut it down.

Personally, I've never really eaten many blackberries, but I could see keeping a few of the young canes for more berries next year. It really just depends on what we find when we cut into the bushes later this fall. If I can find a few tall, straight first year canes inside there, and if I can successfully transplant them, I'll make sure the fruit is really nice next year. But as is, they are just where I would like to put a couple of bushes and one really big tree eventually.

Lastly, the roses. You can see the bushes thinning out in the pictures above, but I'd like to give you a bit of proper before and after shots because that was quite a job.

And now for the after shots (Also you can see what I was saying about the wall yesterday)

Having not been pruned in a couple years probably, the bushes are now looking a bit thin. I took out all the weeds and dead branches and then some of the healthy growth that was in the completely wrong place but tried to leave as many leaves as possible. So now they are a bit taller than I would like, but once winter comes round, I will cut them all down and hopefully, they be more beautiful than ever next year.

Now to end this entry, I'll give you a couple of rose close-ups.

Thirsty Plants

The plumbing was officially finished this last Saturday! If only we had a hose that I could have used right away, I know all the plants were dying of thirst but I started looking around for the old red hose we saw laying on the patio some time ago and found it was gone. Probably taken by the previous owner just like all the knobs from our built-in cabinets (lucky for us though he left us plenty of trash to compensate). So on Sunday, I forced Patrick out to Home Depot and we bought a hose, a hose reel and a longer shovel. The shovel because my coworker came to the house early Saturday to adopt some of the plants I don't like and found that we only had a useless half-size shovel. Also, there was just the one so I got to watch her digging in the dry dry clay for quite a while to get at the plants she wanted. She took away the Purple sea Lavender,the succulents by the garage, and a couple of Irises. Not that I dislike Irises, the ones we've inherited just need to be divided and replanted quite badly. I think they'll bloom big and blue next year from what my neighbor has told me.

When we got back to the house, we spread out the very kinky hose and turned on the water. Sadly, we found that the hose bib leaks quite badly in the on position. We put a bucket under it for the time being but will ask our contractor if he can fix it. Next, we found out that the nozzles we bought for the hose were rubbish. The water should naturally not flow when one isn't pulling on the trigger but the manufacturer apparently doesn't agree. So we had a small stream of water following us to each of the plants we watered. The poor roses who I've been so cruel to, pruning quite a lot off of them in the middle of summer with no drink afterwards - they finally got a good soaking. We continuously watered around everything for a good thirty minutes, then set to work at clearing weed grass. But I swear the ground was already dry again, everywhere. At my parent's house if I water one of the beds, I see run off almost straight away because of the bad clay but our ground was so dry it just soaked up gallons upon gallons without one little trickle running away.

While this picture is from before we watered that yard, it shows from a wider angle all the progress we've made. Sadly, you can see the construction debris still there, but Abel assures me it will be gone this week.

Also, a very nice discovery concerning our strange little retaining wall.

We originally thought, with the grass tall on both sides of the wall, that the wall was made of poured concrete and then topped with some landscape rocks but now that the weeds are mostly gone, we can see that it is actually made of a lot of very nice landscape stones. Whoever put it up must have laid a line of stones then with a form around it, poured a bit of concrete on top, then did three or four more layers of rock and concrete. It's still a horrible sight but now we figure, as the concrete is from a very bad mix, we can buy some hand chisels and get the stones out to use for our dry creek bed.

Clearing the Garden

While the contractor set to work this last week, we also set to work on the garden area. Mostly working in the backyard, as there is nothing up front but weeds and grass. Well, except for one small street tree - a crape myrtle - and a bush next to our chimney. I weeded all around the curb and cut out the oversized bush completely. Then, I found a water spout hidden inside it! No wonder is was growing fast.

But, other than that, it's been the backyard. It turns out that Patrick does like working in the garden though in a predictable man-way. He likes using his power tools - mower and string trimmer - and using the big loppers. He would quite like to clear everything to the ground so I have banned him from the rose bushes and the magnolia tree (it may look sickly but we might be able to save it). After a couple of nights, the yard, excepting the rubbish pile, was looking quite a bit better.

From this:

To this:

By the way, look at the base of the Magnolia tree above, and you might be able to tell that there isn't a rotten branch coming out towards the camera anymore. There was one, to be sure, but as I was talking to Patrick about the magnolia tree, I hit the branch saying that it needed to be taken off and it fell right off! I'm not sure what that makes me think about bringing the tree back to health.

Anyway, we've gathered all the trimmings into our own rubbish heap just behind the garage.

While you're looking at the picture above, look at the strange shape of our lemon tree. It's a very nice tree, in that it has great lemons and seems disease free, but it has the strangest shape. We've cut quite a few lower branches off already to get to this point and there are definitely more coming off but we're quite sure now that we won't be able to make this look like a nice tree. It looks kind of nice in the picture above, but try another angle:

Actually, I'm getting tired of looking at the tree and wondering what it will look like with a few more cuts so maybe I'll focus on the tree when we go to the house tonight. I know Patrick will enjoy taking off the big branches hehe. At the least we can work at getting those two lower limbs off.

Starting Work

Well, we closed just over five days ago and already our contractor, Abel Diaz of A&D Construction and his crew have put in four days of work (although I only have pictures of three). On the day we closed, Wednesday, when I got home, even though Patrick was on the couch with a headache and some bug he caught over the weekend, he wanted to go with me to the house (probably because he knew I was dieing to get started). So we went out, grabbed some pizza and went off to the house. We met Abel when we got there and had a short walk-through and gave him the keys so his crew could get in the next morning. So he left and we were again locked out of our house. But we weren't going to do anything in the house anyway.

We went out to the back and started hacking at the weeds. Patrick quickly decided it was useless not having a weedwacker and I agreed. So we did what we could and the next day came back with one.

However...

This is a picture of the result of the work that was done Thursday which made me quite happy and anxious to see the bare inside. Patrick may be looking a little cross but it's not at the mess. It's kinda because we couldn't go inside to see what had gone on... The crew started early at 7am and probably went home around 5, but we didn't manage to get there until 6:30 with our trip to Home Depot. So no one was there and we'd given our keys to Abel. Actually, even if we had an extra copy of the keys, we'd given them some new lock sets to install and forgot to open them first and get out the extra keys so we were locked out. I'd have called Abel, but I'd also forgot my phone... that's probably what's made Patrick look frustrated! hehe. So we simply went back home because all our garden tools were locked up and Patrick didn't want to weed whack without gloves and a mask (allergies) and these were locked up too.

But we could see that Abel and the crew had gotten a ton done (the dumpster will be there later this week). They'd already started demolishing the porch.

Then by the end of Friday, they'd finished the job.

As you can see, there's a small access problem at the moment but we don't have to worry about rain, as the roof is still on! It was about the only stable part of the old porch. They'll be rebuilding top to bottom I guess.

The other bit of progress is in the kitchen, see my semi-panorama, left to right:


They've yet to knock down the middle wall dividing the back of the room but they have removed the the bits perpendicular to it which made the doorways to the smaller rooms. The place already looks much bigger and brighter. You can see in the left picture where our washer, dryer, and water heater (in a cabinet) will be, next to the original cabinets we will refinish later. And here's a better picture of them since I didn't have one earlier.

Of course, I haven't actually taken a picture of the full cabinets... Silly me, there are two more panels to the left without a gap in the middle.

They also managed to gut the bathroom in the two days before the weekend - normally they work Saturdays, but they took this one off for the 4th. So your first pictures of our bathroom are just of the the bare floor boards and the toilet the previous owners must have had for two decades before selling.

There used to be a horrendous one piece shower stall connected to the protruding pipes behind which the toilet hid, nearly invisible. But gladly, that is now in pieces in our back yard rubbish heap.

Now, that's about it, no rebuilding happening as of the 4th, but they've been working all done today and as we're (reluctantly myself) taking a night off from gardening so we'll have to see what's been going on tomorrow. But as I have a few better pictures of other areas of the house, here they are:

The doorway to the bath and two bedrooms which they're widening for us.

View into the living room from the dining room.

And our now superfluous front door.

Next, I'll show you the progress we've made from going every night to the garden since last Wednesday.