The Clean Up: aka Getting Organized

Nearly two weeks ago, the backyard/shared fence neighbors called my landlord because they want him to "go halves" on a stone fence, which brought him over to my place. He wasn't happy about the state of the backyard.

Baseball season is just coming to an end. Frankly, if you're not a little white ball with 108 red stitches, I could care less about you from January through mid-June, sometimes til the end of July. So in all fairness, the yard needed some work. I objected to the condescending tone ("do you really need those barrels of drinking water?") and the inference that the place is otherwise a gilded, marble mansion which we are allowing to deteriorate into dishabille. 

Anyway. DH was gone all week, so it was up to me and the kids. Progress was slow and steady, and we only did a little bit every day. We actually got most of it done a week ago, with this week carting off my leaf fuel supply (sniff), and today building a wood container shed (LL wanted me to get rid of the wood, but after this week of SCE/power cut off, I decided not to), and cutting up the wood so it is usable.

Learned something new: my table saw works, but it draws a HUGE amount of power wattage--which threw my breakers and strained my 2000w generator. Holy cow! So the table saw's going bye bye this week. 

Borrowed my neighbor's 14" electric chain saw and cut up the eucalyptus branches plus some 2x4 wood posts and some planks of wood. Used the re-purposed planks of wood to build the wood shed, and create braces for the garage rafters so we can get stuff off the garage floor and up into the rafters and move stuff from the house into the garage.

The re-purposed wood, shed:

If you recall from my blogpost Fuel and Food, the leaves are what went bye bye (I was going to make newspaper and carbon fuel logs), and the branches, although there wasn't a lot of them, ended up a very nice stack.

 We trimmed up the (IMO worthless) palm trees which seem to be de rigeur in southern California. The ground at this place is literally hard, rigid, compacted clay. Nothing worthwhile grows here. That dark rich looking earth? That's my wonderful 4 inches deep, 25 feet long, 3 feet wide worth of home-created compost that's being sacrificed on the altar of landlord superficial beauty. 

I had to dig up my garden space, moved the wood garden barrier over and created a barrier between the crab grass "lawn" and where the lemon tree and other 'decorative' bush is. As I said, nothing worthwhile grows in this soil, and this particular area is enshrouded in shade 90% of the day, so even if it had great soil, nothing would grow. We put down some of that (IMO garbage) colored 'decorative' bark which (IMO) does nothing but add contaminants to the soil, but that might just be my ecology roots showing.

Since I was living at Home Depot (the big box hardware store) today, after conferring with my neighbor who is growing a citrus orchard in containers for crying out loud!,

I broke down and bought two blueberry bushes (they were on sale for US$16 each), which already had a miniscule amount of blueberries on them. I'll likely buy some "pretty" containers and transplant them into the containers, and place the containers in that big, unused, colored bark area.

Long 10 days. I'm hoping it will pay off.