Fence work

Part of the purchase and sale agreement when we sold part of our land to our neighbor (so he could split his lot into two) was that he would replace the existing fence. I was home from work today and heard (de)construction sounds which seemed close enough to be in our yard. Took a peek out the window and the fence was being torn down.

Back yard with fence, 7/2003

Back yard without fence

As you can tell, things look quite different right now without the barrier. Of course, we've made some changes in the past six years as part of the long-term landscaping project, in addition to things having grown on their own.

The large tree on the right is our pear tree. When we first moved in it would bear a lot of fruit (enough to fill a couple wheelbarrows) but it also seemed to be in pretty bad shape. We worked on the suckers (trimming some, tipping others), trimmed branches which seemed to be dipping too low, removed deadwood, etc. The tree looks better now, but we'll have to see how this year's crop turns out (last couple years weren't quite as huge as before, most likely due to the strange weather).

Underneath the pear tree we've just let the daylilies do whatever they want, so they're very thick now. It'll make it challenging when we eventually pull them out, but for now it's nice to be able to look out when they're in bloom.

In the middle of the old picture near my car is a bunch of iris and crocosmia. We still have some now, but a few years ago a friend came over and helped us dig everything up (including the plastic that was underneath it all). She took home a bunch of bulbs and we replanted so the patch wouldn't be as crowded. Now we're just letting it grow pretty wild, since we plan to get to the area later in the landscaping project. The grill is there now, too. Before, it was on the front porch, but it's lived towards the back since we had the front porch redone.

On the left, the old picture shows the covered, chained-in area where we kept our trash (which we now keep on the driveway next to the fence). We think the previous owners had dogs in there at one time, before they converted the entire back strip of the property to a dog run. We were never really happy with it so it came out a couple years ago and we started planning our vegetable garden.

The shorter vegetable bed went in last year and the other two this year. What you see in the shorter bed is snap peas (with the trellis), tomatoes, and strawberries. On the closer (north) side of the two longer beds is corn. The house side of the middle bed is potatoes, and you can't see the cauliflower by the house in the left bed. There's also squash and pumpkin squeezed into those two beds, which hopefully will spread out to where the corn and cauliflower live, once they're done.

We've been gradually chipping over our lawn. It's in pretty good shape this time of year, but we let it go brown in the middle of summer (which it was for the earlier picture).