CAMP WILLOW CREEK

Still Standing

Ok. I’ll get right to it: This one scared me. I woke up at 4am to howling winds and flashing strobe lights. I feared going to the window and look. I contemplated going to the downstairs bathroom to hide. I stayed in bed under the covers too freaked out to do either.

A few hours later, I woke again, this time to the whirl of chainsaws. The calm had returned although the power had not. I ventured out to see if anything was left in the neighborhood. Across the street a tree had fallen on a neighbors’ truck and was covering his entire driveway. Next door the very top of a 40-foot pine crashed down in the back yard, narrowly missing a brand new car. Debris was everywhere.

In our backyard, most of the dead trees were now horizontal. A 20-foot top section of what was (just yesterday) a 50-foot pine tree crashed down behind the dollhouse. A double-trunked (also dead) tree right next to the dollhouse fell down and came to rest in the “V” of a living tree, breaking one of its trunks. The dollhouse, much like our own house, remained unscathed.

In the afternoon, we ventured out of the neighborhood and found downed powerlines and trees. Friends and news stories confirmed we were spared the worst of what was apparently 2-4 small tornadoes hopping around.

MULCH

That pretty much sums it up.  Pine bark, not straw, if you were wondering.

I went to Target the other night in search of a solar-powered low-voltage outdoor lighting set.  But not just any solar-powered low-voltage outdoor lighting set, an ON SALE solar-powered low-voltage lighting set.  I couldn’t find it.  I was very successful in locating $83 dollars worth of other products, including, but not limited to, this.  I couldn’t wait to fire that bad Larry up this weekend for at least 3 reasons: 1) it promised to make my plants twice as big 2) I am very impatient and 3) my mom scared me into thinking I had doomed my freshly planted mailbox neighbors by using something other than Scotts brand topsoil.

So, I got up early this morning and donned my yarding garb and went outside to play in the dirt.  That’s when I found out it was FREAKING COLD OUT.  I fed the plants and then ran back inside to my warm kitchen to cut up strawberries and marinate some ribs.

Later, when the sun made it round to the front of the house, I ventured back out to work on the mulch.  So now there is mulch to hold in all that yummy plant food they got this morning.  I expect to have some ferocious vegitation in the coming days.

Yawn

Ok.  Maybe this is a little more work than i realized.  I am dead tired, but  Project mailbox is pretty much in the books at this point.  On Saturday, J helped me — after riding 6+ miles on mountain bike dirt trails — dig out the bed and move the dirt and grass we no longer wanted.  It looked like a much smaller area before we started working it.

Then on Sunday, we went plant shopping.  The store we went to was great.  Everyone there was really helpful and didn’t treat us like dirt (pardon the joke) because we didn’t know what we were doing.  The first woman was especially great. She helped us find everything on our list that the store had in stock, replaced the one thing they didn’t have with another suggestion and replanted a plant that was in a mixture so we could complete the list.  The cashier helped us pick out the top soil and additives we needed and then 3 strong young men loaded it all into the tiny neon trunk for us.  For a shopping experience, it rocked.

I will go back….for some mulch. That’s really all that’s left for the project except watching the plants grow and fill out the bed.  And maybe planting a clematis around the mailbox for mom.

Oh and don’t be fooled by that last sentence into thinking I know what I’m talking about when it comes to what I planted out there.  All I know is that everything is a perennial which is french for “you don’t have to do anything next year and there will still be flowers” and that the varieties in the selection are scheduled to bloom at different times of the year.

Goodbye Holly & Molly

…Before and After.

I came home from work last night and Molly was missing. Well most of Molly was missing.  J had the day off and went ahead and got a head start on her.  I was so excited.  I couldn’t wait to check it out this morning and see how it looked.

I love it.

I think this weekend I will work on taking those little shrubby guys out of there.  I don’t know what they are, but just in case there are baby Holly and Molly seeds lurking in their midst, I want them gone.  Plus I am kind of enjoying this destructive side of landscaping.

Is that wrong?

Phase 1 – Days 2 & 3

 The bunny keeper did not make like a bag of pine needles and leave like the rest of our rubbish last week.  She lives now at the end of the driveway.  I almost ran her over today.  Clearly she will need a better home.  We’ll see.  Maybe the troll heads out back will have some ideas.

I raked some more and we cleaned up the top half of the yard and the driveway and that really ugly patch next to our neighbor’s perfectly green lawn.  This time, instead of all that extra work of putting pine needles into countless bags, I found a home for them under the pine trees.  More specifically, I made what amounts to a bear trap in that giant sink hole under the pine trees.  It really doesn’t look that bad.  Just don’t walk in there looking for the Bunny Keeper.

The really big news of the weekend was the brutal murder of Holly I.  Holly’s limbs were hacked off one-by-one, Holly’s roots were severed, Holly’s trunk was shaken and beaten until she finally let lose of the dirt.  Once Holly’s carcass was dragged away, I came close to the house and discovered many things – Like a doorbell and a really ugly light.  Of course, now that we know we can do it, Holly II’s demise is imminent.

We also began a small experiment today.  We put some stuff on the ground.  We’re hoping it turns into grass. Since we can’t read, we really have no idea what we put on the ground, but there was a picture of a pretty green lawn on the front of the bag, so we think we’re headed in the right direction.

Phase 1: Clean-up

Today we made our first efforts in the field of landscaping. Armed with a rake, a box of leaf & lawn trashbags and two pairs of blue-palmed rubber gloves we set off into the great unknown of our Front Yard.

• - We corraled four six – i’ve been corrected - bags of pine needles and leaves.
• - We dashed the hopes of two young holly trees.
• - We uprooted several hundred weeds – oh, I hope those were weeds.
• - We unearthed some landscaping stone from an age gone by.
• - We evicted the lawn cherub and her ceramic bunnies.
• - We set the mailbox free from its 4-inch plastic cage.

We still have 2/3 of the front yard left to do.

This looks interesting

These are the pictures from the Buyer Info sheet. I drove by this house earlier this week and wrote down the address. The neighborhood seems really nice. Its older, but most of the houses are traditional styles instead of that contemporary 80′s style with the diagonal wood siding and diamond-shaped windows.

Another important thing I noted was that everyone’s mailbox was NOT the same. That means that the HOA in this neighborhood isn’t a crazy totalitarian dictatorship. That’s good becuase we really want that manatee mailbox we saw when we went to Marco Island.