The Backyard

This first picture was taken sometime last fall. It is part of our back fence which leans a little inward. To the left and straight back is a ligustrum or what I like to call a very, very tall weed. You probably can't tell, but it is between 20 and 30 feet with the tops hanging out in o

ur electrical wires. That bare patch of ground in front of the fence is pretty much what it looks like most of the year beyond the intense 5 month green unidentifiable weed period and the mass leaf period during the fall/winter. Of course, the ligustrum is hardy and green, pretty much all the time or at least they used to be... 

The next picture  is another view of the ligustrum in the winter. The finger is pointing the odd hackberry that has managed to live alongside the line of ligustrum."The Man" and I wrestled and guided the the tops down with an extension chord, so we could cut them down bit by bit and not take down the electricity wires with it. Now you might be asking yourself, shouldn't the city take care of those since they could create some kind of hazard with the electrical wires. I did call them and they chopped a ragged line through the ligustrum, but they didn't feel the need to remove the evil weeds. The arborist we hired to trim the trees in the front was kind enough to add one of the large hackberry trees and two of the last remaining ligustrum to what we were paying done to our keep happy trees since he had some time. 

This next picture is a different angle on that back fence and was taken in June. There is a pomegranate bush on the other side of the chain-link, but notice no tall ligustrum. Those little bushes  by the fence are what has grown back since we chopped them all down. There were at least 10 different groups that were 20/30 ft tall growing along the chain link fence with the odd hackberry growing in the chain-link fence between them and a rather large hackberry at the end of the line toward the house. I feel pretty proud in seeing how much we did.

On the other side of the back privacy fence is another ligustrum that "the man" does not want me to cut down. There are two on the other side of our back fence. I keep trying to tell him  that the roots of those ligustrum are steeling nutrients from our side of the yard, dropping their evil propagating berries on my garden plans, and from experience trying to plant some new happy little trees those roots are more than 6 feet in length and near the surface. I suspect if you now know why I will be doing my food gardening in raised beds. After making a heroic effort to dig up and pull out some ligustrum roots, I decided I better start gardening smarter and figure out a way to only dig up what I feel absolutely must go, though, that doesn't mean I don't have plans to cut them all down and keep them from taking over the yard again.

In the middle of the yard is a triangle shape of sheet mulching and three plants. The alligator juniper closest to the back fence is alive and still doing well though the push of the wind makes it lean forward. The plant in the foreground is a will yaupon holly. It's dead. I planted it too late and I suspect it required more than I realized in care. You can't really see it behind the chair, but there is a single mountain laurel hanging out which I had tried planting in the front yard and transplanted just before it was about to bite the dust into the back yard. It likes the back yard. I think the front yard is too moist for it and there is too much grass.

I suspect that my overall landscaping plan of sticking to drought-tolerant, low-water needing, low maintenance, sun-loving Texas native plants or other desert region plants is the way to go for the backyard just by the survival rate of the few plants I've managed to stick in the ground. The only yearly gardening work I want to do eventually besides pruning which I like is food gardening. 

So far what I have discovered in my gardening travails...

Is that I'm pretty sure we are in the blacklands prairie section of Austin with the hard to dig in clay just under the dusty ground.  

That the getting my yard ready to garden is going to take a lot more time than my impatience may be able to withstand or that somehow I will figure out how to manage the lack of real progress in the yard. I'm hoping blogging about it will help.

Tools are expensive, but having the right tool for the job helps a lot.

Nature really doesn't like bare ground and "the man" is adverse to me spending money on covering the ground all at once.

This is the opposite side of the yard from the line of ligustrum. There is just one ligustrum left standing tall next to the shed and it is the widest of them all. I think I may wait another month or two to cut it down, though I did cut the one on the other side of the shed down. You can see the shoots growing up already. 

I think this picture was taken only a week after I cut the evil thing down. Of course there is evil and then there is really evil. That pretty green viney thing in the back left of the picture on the privacy fence that is all poison oak.

 I don't think I am allergic to poison oak or I would have been covered in rashes long before now, since there was a pile of leaves 4 inches thick in that corner in the winter that I raked up. From my research, poison oak even dried can cause a reaction 3-5 yrs after it has been killed. Don Gardener, the arborist we consulted about our trees, wasn't sure if it was poison oak because it didn't have leaves at the time he saw it but it looked pretty ominous as if it came out of a cemetery in a horror movie. I found a website that had an easy way to test it. Take a white sheet of printer paper and crush some leaves in it. Don't forget the gloves. I did this and within ten minutes the paper started turning black. The black streaks was the uroshial oil which is apparently what causes the reaction in humans. "The Man" and I joked about hiring some goats to come eat it all since animals don't tend to have problem with it. 

Oh my, it is raining outside. Well, that is the end of my blogging for the day. We are in stage 2 water restrictions, so I want to set out our spare trash cans to catch as much rain as I can. I'll finish talking about the rest of the backyard some other time, when there is no rain dancing to do.