My yard, not my blog, is moving. How can that happen, you ask? Well, it can happen when you buy the house directly behind you and do in that yard what you've done in your current yard.



I love it when everything falls into place, and everything seemed to fall into place when the house behind us went up for sale in August. Having lived behind it and seen it from our kitchen and patio for the past 25 years, we were almost as familiar with that house as our own. You've probably seen it in my blog photos. Low interest rates and a bargain price (due to needed repairs) put it within our reach. At the same time, our sons had already planned to move back to Reno this fall. They will rent and/or buy our current house.

The poor yard

Where do I start? The place once had a nice yard with an automatic irrigation system, lots of trees, concrete curbing, a pond with a waterfall, three patios. When we made our offer, however, it probably hadn't been watered in a year. The lawns were yellow and crunchy. The trees and shrubs were struggling. A large area in back was covered with weed cloth, mulch, and . . . lots of weeds. Weeds were growing all over the front yard, too.

As soon as our offer was accepted, we started going over and watering once a week. Some nice rainfalls helped, too. Some of the trees were already too far gone, but I think all of the shrubs survived.

Escrow closed three weeks ago, and the first few days I pulled the prickly lettuce out of the front yard and sprayed the white top. I cut out the overgrown, mostly dead pyracantha and cut off the crabapple limb that was dragging in the neighbor's yard. Our sons hauled the fake trees with the blue plastic leaves (that had been blowing into our yard) to the dump for me.

Since then, however, I've been on wallpaper-scraping duty. It's been killing me to ignore all the weeds going to seed in the yard and the dead branches in the rose bushes that need to be pruned, but I'm afraid yardwork is going to have to wait until spring. Our first priority is getting the house in good enough shape just to move into.

The first challenges

It's probably good that I'll have a few months to become more familiar with the yard and kick landscaping ideas around. One of our first challenges will be the beautiful cottonwood tree you see in the top photo. We've enjoyed that tree the whole time we've lived here. But the former owner thought it would be a good idea to build a raised deck around it, and he buried it several feet deep. Now bark is peeling off the trunk, and we're afraid it's going to blow over onto the house. As much as I hate to kill any plant, I'm afraid it's already dying and we're going to have to take it out before the wind does.

See the unnaturally green tree on the far left of the top photo? When the nearby trees had scarce, yellowish leaves in September, this crabapple had lush, dark green leaves. While the leaves on the crabapple in my current yard are yellow and falling now, you can see this one is still green. I figured out the reason is it's planted in the septic tank leach line. What were they thinking? Tree roots are bad for leach lines! I'm afraid this one will have to go, too. (Don't worry—for some reason all the trees in the back yard besides the two cottonwoods are fruit trees. And it's too close to the fence, too.)




The pond with the waterfall? It was built by piling dirt and rocks up against an aging fence and stacked blocks, and the neighbor says it leaks into his yard. The white plastic lattice covered with plastic foliage for a backdrop makes me wonder who thought that was a nice finishing touch. Sure, privacy is nice, and plastic lattice has its place, but isn't the whole point of a pond to enjoy nature? I think we need to take out the whole mess. I've always wanted a pond, but this one has too many problems. Maybe we can re-use the space with a new liner and salvage the plants and rocks—but not lean everything up against the fence.

Next spring

My landscaping plans in general are to apply what I've learned here over the years. For example, I want to have lawn just near the house with drought-tolerant plants next to the street in the front yard and native plants (rabbitbrush, of course) in the back part of the back yard.

Oh, and as soon as our offer was accepted I started collecting seeds and potting plants I want to take with me. I'm sure our sons won't mind my coming back next spring to take even more. A nice thing about buying a house so close is I know exactly what thrives around here and what doesn't. See? That's how a yard moves.