The yard

We are in the fourth year of a severe drought so the water district has been offering rebates if you take out your front yard and replace it with low water plants.  So we did it.  The yard looked pretty bad before so wouldn't be hard to improve it.  The grass was close to dead since I'd quit watering it the year before.  We had a couple of weird bushed and a tree I hated.  It had been planted too close to the house and grew out at a 45 degree angle. 

We had a crew come in with sod cutters and take out what was left of the grass and the bushes.  The tree was already gone.  Next came tilling and putting the pipes in place for a drip irrigation system.

We brought in 6 cubic yards of path sand.  Grandpa was here the week we worked on this so he did a lot of the heavy lifting moving dirt and putting the sand in place.  Even after taking out the sod I was surprised at how much dirt we needed to take out so that we had room for the sand wood chips.  Luckily our neighbor needed some.  Thank you Grandpa!

It was penguin week AND dirt moving week.  I hope my parents come back.  I'll come up with easier projects next time.

Next came the wood chips.  We called up a tree company and they delivered a whole truck load of chips for free.  I like the free part.  As a bonus this load came from a bay laurel tree so it smells wonderful.  Imagine your yard full of the bay leaves you use in soups.  The smells has mostly dissipated now, but I still get a whiff of it now and then when I'm watering.  Moving the wood chips took days.  The pile was 4-5 feet high and filled the drive way.  That's a lot of wood chips.  Fortunately they aren't as heavy as sand and dirt.  I worked in the morning and evening at the same time the neighbors were out for their walks.  It was fun to meet neighbors I'd never talked to before.

The finished product doesn't look like much right now.  I could take a year or two or more for the plants to start growing in.  This is really the worst time to plant.  Fall or early spring would have been much better for the plants.  I planted a low creeping ceanothus (Yankee point), santolina, a grey leafed plant with cute yellow pom pom flowers, gazania and euryops which both have yellow daisy-like flowers, a lantana that is both purple and gold, Mexican primrose, yellow yarrow, osteopermum (African daisy), and cape plumbago, stonecrop sedum which blooms red in the fall.  I also brought some bearded irises from the back yard.  I know wrong time of year to dig up irises, but they needed to be in place for the inspection.

I'll do more as I watch this grow in and see what needs to be done.  I want to add more irises, clumps of daffodils, and some California poppies.  It has been a lot of work, but I've mostly enjoyed the process.  When I'd get paralyzed by ignorance I'd just tell myself, "It's only plants.  You can dig them up if you don't like it."  I had to look at is at a work in progress rather than a finished thing to keep my sanity.  I learned a lot.

In the back we replaced all of the sprinkler heads for more efficient ones.  Of course it wasn't just a matter of twisting out the old ones and twisting on the new ones.  The old heads were 4 inches tall.  The new ones are 8 inches tall.  So this involved digging with shovels and an auger and flexy tubing risers.  More of a job than I wanted.  I never want to do that again.  We still haven't put in the drip system in the front so more irrigation stuff is in my future, but this time it won't involve digging through rocks.