Category: Garden

Not sure if I ever mentioned our garage, but it’s slowly collapsing. All three walls have cracks, some of them about 4″ wide. It’s definitely got a lot worse since we got the house so we thought we should rescue our little sailing boat in case it got destroyed, the only trouble was that the driveway was covered in concrete and rocks which needed to be removed first.

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The skip arrived on Friday and we started on Saturday, it wasn’t a warm day but the weather was perfect as we both soon worked up a sweat. I also jack hammered away a patch of concrete as the start of the drive as this is roughly where the sewer pipe will go and we will need to dig a trench for that sometime soon.

You’ll see that we found three sets of initials on the concrete, no idea who they are though, one looks like “CPT”, another “RT” and the last “DS 97”

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This was a hardcore only skip, so we could only add concrete, stone or bricks, hence why we had to sieve out the leaves and soil from some of the smaller stones. Having a hardcore only skip, keeps the cost down as they can sometimes reuse the rubble for fill.

We pretty much got the boat out as the light was fading on Sunday and then we went to Keegan Ales for a well deserved couple of pints. Next week we’ll put a tarp over the boat to protect it from the elements.

We would pull the garage down, however our architect advised us against and to leave it until we were ready to rebuild it, reason being, it’s on the property line and if we demolished it now and went to rebuild it in five years time, then we might not get planning permission for it.

In response to one of our earlier lawn related posts, friends of Aimee, Maria and Pete, kindly gave us their old mower and when I say old, it’s only three years old and for most of that time it’s been in storage. Maria and Pete have a steep lawn and as this is a push mower they upgraded to a self propelled model. The mower is in great condition and should serve us very well. We’ll probably get it serviced later this month so it will be ready to go this spring. Thank you again Maria and Pete and we look forward to taking you out for beers and burgers at The Anchor or Buns sometime soon. Incidentally for anyone reading this in the Bay Area, Pete designed and built the sound studio labs at Expression college in Emeryville in the late 90’s.

So this weekend we were blessed (or cursed) with warm weather, temperatures hit 65°F (18°C). It was a bizarre shift from full clothing to shorts and t-shirts but it was blessing for working in the garden. Tomorrow temperatures will drop below freezing. Marie told us that this was the warmest day in the area since 1975.

We’d also like to thank Don the Johnson for lending us two cordless chainsaws. I was bit dubious as to how they worked, but I eat my words, they were great, so thank you Don. We only used the smaller model as it was easier to handle up in the trees, also I tried the Dewalt for about 15 seconds and the chain didn’t seem to run well on the blade, nor did it cut well, so possibly a new blade or tune up is needed, which we will look into in return for your generous loan. In the end I think we did a decent job at cutting the trees in a manner which still left the tree looking wonderful.

By the I’m wearing a harness so I can securely rope myself to the tree/ladder. I also secured the ladder to the tree which was fortunate as tree limbs often fall unexpectedly. A lot of the limbs we cut off had a lot of vines holding them up so there were a few occasions when some of the heavy limbs swung back and smacked me on the shoulder or glanced off my head, luckily I was wearing a full face visor. It would be nice to get some advice on how to do this in a safer manner so I’ll ask my arborist friend Win. I think for now, we have pretty cut off the majority of branches and anything else can be left to the experts.

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I know, all we seem to do is play in the garden and climb trees when we should be working on the house. Well it was just too nice a day to stay in doors, a toasty -5°C/23°F (luckily no wind chill) and the sun was shining. We’re pruning the trees to thin the canopy, remove dead wood and remove some of the branches which overhang the lawn. We are being careful in what we remove as we don’t want to spoil the visual aspect of the trees and after we have finished you probably won’t notice that they have been cut at all. I won’t seal the cuts as it seems that trees can look after themselves.

Currently I’m just taking off some of the main branches, leaving 3 – 4 foot stumps on the tree which I’ll trim flush with the main trunk at a later date. The reason I’m leaving long stumps is that when a branch breaks, it can cause tear out, which you can see was what happened in the video below and I don’t want that to happen to the main tree. As for the stumps, I’ll cut them off in shorter lengths, 1 – 2 foot so I can control the wood as it starts to fall. When I was cutting this branch (and it was pretty big) you could hear it going and I didn’t want to be up there when it went. I’m lucky I did go down as that could have been messy as it hit the ladder on it’s descent and the branch went quick.

Still using the trusting Bahco bow saw, but starting to feel that I could do with a powered chainsaw, not sure if I’d buy an electric corded or a gas/petrol one. I’m not looking for a super powerful behemoth of a chainsaw, rather something small and lightweight. We used to have a corded Black and Decker one in the UK which worked great for anything less than about 9″ in diameter. By the way I think this is the first time I have ever used the word behemoth in any written form and if you’re interested it’s origins are:

Behemoth comes from the Hebrew word b’hemah meaning beast.

I also found out that I’ve been pronouncing it incorrectly, shame on me. By the way we did buy a larger Bahco bow saw, however we’ve lost it so if either of us have left it at your house, can we have it back please?

Lastly the stones at the base of the tree aren’t grave stones but they could be, but that’s another story …

I found him while I was jack hammering up the hearth of the chimney we recently removed. I’ll probably chisel him out completely from the concrete tomorrow. There’s also a small ball which you can see in the last photo. I wonder how many decades he’d been trapped?

Note “Hutton” in reverse, this was the local brickyard for which Ponckhockie residents provided a lot of the workforce.

So if you’ve ever wondered where some of your favourite childhood toys went, your parents buried them under a concrete slab, probably …

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Managed to get the grass cut before winter sets in – we expect snow tomorrow. We borrowed the mower from our great neighbours Justin and Laurie. It should have been cut earlier and next year we’ll do a better job especially as one of Aimee’s friends is going to give us an old mower.

Over the following months I’ll trim back some of the tree limbs overhanging the grass so the lawn will get a bit more light and in the spring we’ll add a bit more grass seed as the lawn is still a little patchy.

It’s nice to see at least one thing looking decent at DM. The last picture is how we found the garden when we bought the house.

P.S. It did snow in the night.

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It wasn’t a huge stump, the tree was probably forty foot high, but all tree stumps are a pain to remove. I remember working on removing tree stumps from two hundred year old oaks at my parents and that was an ordeal. It took weeks, digging a trench around the stumps, deeper and deeper, cutting the thick roots with axes until you could get a hand cranked chain winch to pull the bugger out. This wasn’t a weekend event, rather a multiple weekend event. Compared to those old stumps this was an easy one.

That said I’m not as young as I used to be and in the heat and humidity it was a pain getting it out, luckily it was on a slope so one side of it’s roots were easy to get to. We wanted this stump out as we want to put French drains down the side of this wall, plus the roots were coming into the basement.

We had a small fire tonight and started on burning the roots and stump 🙂

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We finally have a lawn. It doesn’t look much yet as we still have new grass growing but at least it’s no longer an impenetrable mass (see last handful of photos). We still need to work on the lower section which will require weeding, digging, tilling, getting the correct gradient and then sowing. We may start some of this over the next couple of months or failing that we try and get it done early spring. In the meantime we’ll probably just cover it in plastic sheet to kill the weeds.

Still need to buy a mower and debating whether to go petrol (which I’m used to) or electric. In the meantime we may see if our kind neighbours will lend us theirs.

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It’s now been three weeks since we planted the first band of grass and it’s coming on nicely and the second band is also showing signs of life as well. We’ve been very lucky with the weather and the rain looks like it will continue into next week. Luckily it looks like we’ll have good weather for Aimee’s birthday bbq this Saturday 🙂

We’ll soon be looking for a mower, probably get a Honda, either one that collects the grass like this or one where you have to rake it up like this. Raking up grass is a bit of a pain but I like the simplicity and it reminds me of my Dad’s old Victa mower (looks not to unlike the mower pictured below) which incidentally is now under the stewardship of my friend Martin Winchester in Dinas and is still going strong after 50 plus years.

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At last we have some new grass!!! We didn’t mange to get a hose from our neighbours yet but we we’ve been lucky with wet weather which looks like continuing.

We managed three strips, though in pictures three and four it looks like the guide rail to the left is rising up at the end. Next time I’ll tie a line between the two ends to check. This can always be corrected at a later date. 

The third segment slopes down towards the house and you can see from picture five that I made a new form for this section which has a curve to it. At some point this will be supported near the house by some sort of wall but we haven’t worked that out yet.

The section at the back was planted two weekends ago, next section last weekend and the closest yesterday. There is still work to be done at the upper left of the garden but is was raining today (Sunday) so we worked in doors.

I think my dad would have been quite pleased with how we did 🙂

In pictures three and four Aimee is doing a penguin walk over the area before seeding which helps to compact the loose soil. By the way the landscaping rake (the blue one) is very useful for putting down new lawns.

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Last weekend we dug, tilled and raked the soil but then got frustrated working out the levels. This time we made a decent leveling gig which spanned a good portion of the garden. The first strip was quite a bit of hard work as it required a fare amount of soil to be shifted but the second strip proved to be a lot easier. We did manage to sow grass seed on the first strip and we used a combination of Scott’s Kentucky bluegrass and Perennial ryegrass. That added up to a total of 14 lbs of grass seed which does seem a lot, however we followed this lawn sowing video and I think visually we got the same spread of seeds. We also applied some lawn fertilizer in the process. By the way the grass seed is blue in colour and I have no idea why.

We didn’t sow the second strip as we had run out of grass seed and also the light was failing. We also need to go back next week and grade the bank to the left and the section by the garage before we sow.

We timed packing up our gear on Sunday pretty well as the sky opened as we were putting away the last tools. If you read our last post you’ll know that we don’t have any running water and that means we can’t water the seeds so we are hoping that we will get enough rain for them to germinate. We are also hoping that one of our neighbours will let us run a hose from their house, so fingers crossed on that weather/neighbour front.

This is the current weather forecast for the week.

Lawn preparation. 8th – 9th June, 2019

Lawn preparation. 23rd June, 2019