Yard | Winter is Coming

Well, for those of you that aren’t in my neck of the woods, winter is starting to show its face here and if you haven’t lived here all that means is that my summer blooming plants are starting to go out of season. I haven’t posted in a little over a week and I have to admit I haven’t really had anything profound to say and I have been bogged down with the completely uneventful. But today I took a few minutes to walk around the yard and make a mental list of things that are coming up. The first and easiest thing to do is to start trimming back the ‘mums and some of the other flowers along the fence line. They are still blooming some but in a few more days they will be calling it a season I think. Following that we need to trim the grapes. Last year we did a so-so job trimming and we got awesome grapes. So we are going gonzo this year and while we are at it we are going to re-design the arbor so it won’t drop so many grapes on the wood deck. Also, a couple of my potted plants aren’t doing well lately. I blame myself for that one, I have unfortunately neglected them over the last few weeks. I have a Sago palm sitting in my former tomato garden and I am going to something cool with that, but for now my goal is to make sure it has no problem staying alive. The last big thing is really big. We have decided after much deliberation and conflicting advice from friends to remove the fig tree. Some of you might be saying, ‘No! Don’t do it!’ but trust me, you don’t live here and have the hundreds of figs rotting on your lawn and tracked in by the dog. The irony is that we don’t even like figs! And this tree is big, real big. I have measured it out, I can take that tree out and put a 12′x14′ shed back there (which I desperately need) and plant a different tree between it and the lawn and still have the foliage cover I have now. Its a win-win situation if you aren’t the fig tree…

So that is it for now, lots of work to do and at the end of the winter there might even be some sod coming my way. We’ll see how the lawn and the bank account hold up to the tree removal and the shed.