An American Lawn Tragedy

Black Barney wrote: Some foreign bug infested all seven of my ash trees and I had to chop them all down this Spring

I've got a 2-acre wooded lot that is, essentially, in the middle of the city. Lots of ash trees. The ash borer is murdering my yard. I loose about three trees a year to storms/winds and take down three or so more on my own. It is murdering my lot. I now have a large lawn where I once had a small one, and it's getting larger.

https://goo.gl/photos/qhfVSgp392oPa1ym8

Ugh, sorry to hear it Bryce. Have you looked into getting them treated? It was just as much as having them taken down for me, and the problem will likely come back in a few years.

At least you aren't forced to take them down I guess cuz if they fall, no one will hear them. But i'm in a suburb and if it falls down, it'll take out my neighbour's garden shed or Subaru Outback. I miss them. My yard is just full of stumps now. Like a veterans' meetup.

Yeah, treating is almost the same to take it down, and it has to be done each year, is what I was told.

Just last night, as I was stacking more wood, I was thinking about the ethics of getting rid of ash borer wood on Craigslist.

i gave all of mine to my neighbour. He was super happy

We had 2-3 inches of really wet snow last night. Snapped one tree in half (6-8 inch trunk) and probably did a lot of damage to our main privacy/shade tree, but I can probably salvage that one with pruning.

I was not expecting a May storm to wreak havoc.

My squirrel-proof garden is more than halfway complete. I bought wood, did lots of measurements, and cut everything up with a circular saw. Then I applied two coats of premium deck-quality polyurethane. Next, I manually tilled the garden plot with a shovel and rake. Then I shoveled out my compost bin into the garden, which contained roughly 50 cubic feet of compost. Probably half leaves, 40% grass clippings, and the rest a mixture of ash and table scraps (no meat or dairy), all turned into dirt over the course of the last five years. Then I planted the seeds, knowing that there would be plenty of rain this week. The weather is going to dip down in the high 40's later this week but we should be done with frost until next fall.

Next weekend, I will assemble the wooden frame over the garden, and install the door. Then attach chicken wire to the frame and the door. Finally, I will clean out the compost bin and apply a couple of coats of polyurethane to that structure. I've been touching up the poly each fall on the outside of my compost bin, but the lower half of the inside frame could really use some fresh coats.

During this project, the dandelions have been staging a comeback. So I spend at least a half hour every day just deadheading the dandelions that are getting ready to release seedlings. Once I finish the squirrel-proof garden project, I will resume the War on Dandelions. Meanwhile, my bad neighbors have an extensive crop of dandelions that nearly covers their front yard. I am beginning to appreciate why Nixon authorized bombing runs on Cambodia and Laos.

Black Barney wrote: My yard is just full of stumps now. Like a veterans' meetup.

I kind of feel like Barney is off his medication, or on some new medication, but he's hilarious so I guess it's ok.

Thanks to weather-related delays and other stuff, I didn't get around to the actual assembly of my garden cage until yesterday. The directions stated the assembly should take about two hours, so I set aside the whole day just to make sure, with some hope that there would be to attach at least the bottom three feet worth of chicken wire. The pressure is on because my seedling are already sprouting, and a large, fat rabbit was preparing to feast on them on Saturday morning.

I'm not great with a power drill, despite some distant past professional experience. I tend to have a twitchy trigger finger, which can lead to stripped or even broken screws. So instead of using the drill to just screw in the wood screws, I prefer to pre-drill the holes with a 5/64" bit, then use a phillips screwdriver to put the screws in manually. So that slowed me down, especially when my first two drill bits snapped off in holes, forcing a trip to the hardware store plus a tedious effort to extract the broken drill tips. Then my gf insisted that I take her somewhere for lunch, and that place turned out to be unusually busy.

After lunch, I had a mishap where a vertical piece that hadn't been fully secured yet tipped over and snapped off from the frame. I secured it with a clamp and re-attached it, and made sure to secure my other vertical posts until I could start attaching them on top. Unfortunately, I had miscalculated the angle and length of the sloping top pieces, and they aren't going to connect properly. By then, it was nearly six, so I postponed the trip to the hardware store for more wood. I think that I'm going to dial back the complexity of my original plan and just do a flat top for the cage. 6'4" should be tall enough for me and tall enough for the corn.

Tonight, I am going to knock four posts into the ground and set up a very simple chicken wire fence to at least delay the rabbit invasion. That will buy me enough time to do an adequate job on the revised cage, even if we get rain again for the next two weekends. I want to eventually extend the chicken wire into the ground a foot, and also top off my cage, to prevent squirrels from going after my corn.

These little fucking ground squirrels have been pigging out on my raised beds. I have dropped smoke bombs in there little homes, plugged up their digouts under the neighbor's fence, and run out hissing like some kind of psycho when I see them. I hate trapping these guys, but they need to die.

We moved to Flagstaff and it's unclear what you're supposed to do when most of your yard is covered with large Ponderosa pines. It's beautiful, smells great, but it's impossible to grow anything (to say nothing of grass) and needles and pokey pine cones just accumulate like a mfer.

Update: the Fiskars $35 weeding tool is the angel of death.

You can't climb them either cuz u get all sticky. Can't park under them either

If you get any sun through the pines, irises, hostas, and dahlias grow under pines. My irises are booming in the mix of needle and soil.

Ferns and ivy, too. We have a massive pine tree that takes up most of the front yard and the previous owners let a mound of dirt and pine needles build up around it. 2/3 of said mound is taken up by a spread of ivy that runs from about 5 feet up the tree to the base of the house (and which I have to cut away from the house soon...) The tree is so thick that the ground doesn't get much sun, which is great, but it also leave this bare mound of dirt and pinecones, so I've decided to put a bunch of Japanese painted ferns around it. They need very little sun and are quite durable in all kinds of weather.

We have myrtle that grows as well, but damn do you have to be vigilant that it doesn't take over.