More Work in the Garden

As I said in a previous post, I've been doing a lot of work in the garden. One of the first things I took care of was killing the ivy that was killing the tree by our back porch. I've killed the ivy (pictures of both the live and the dead ivy are below), but I'm not sure yet if I've saved the tree. The fact that fall has arrived doesn't make it any easier to tell. And I'm not sure how to get that ivy down. It is quite ugly now.

Tree smothered by ivy

Tree with Dead Ivy

I also have cleaned out several areas with overgrown planters. Most of them are just left as dirt right now, but I do have my little fall garden. I also cleaned out a couple of the planters in the back yard. 

Backyard planter before

Backyard planter now

Once again, that doesn't look like much of an improvement. I left the azaleas, but everything else was overgrown and ugly close up. I'll plant something new in it next spring, then it will hopefully look pretty both close up and from a distance. 

And I cleaned out the planter in front of our front patio. You can see the before in this shot of the house, the area to the right of the stairs. There wasn't much there to begin with, other than some weedy grass. I dug it up, along with some giant roots and pieces of cement that were hanging out there.

Front Planter now

It's all ready for the blueberry bushes I plan on planting there. I need a bit of a retaining wall to keep the dirt in as well. The sidewalk there has a slope, so the wall will be tall near the stairs and short over at the corner of the house.

My most recent task has been freeing the back fence from it's maze of ivy. I don't really have a great before picture. Here's my best one, but it had gotten much more overgrown. When I cleaned out the ivy, I found 3 overgrown rose bushes underneath. I'm going to try to bring them back to life by pruning them. I know very little about pruning, so we'll see if they are still alive next spring. I don't have a huge fondness for roses, but my grandfather loved them, so I hate to purposely kill them. I have two in the front yard too that I don't really want in the front yard. But if they can survive the transplantation to a different location, I welcome having them around as well. 

Back fence this spring

Back Fence now

Clearly one of my yard tasks will be repairing that fence. I'm hoping the fence posts are solid and I just have to replace the broken boards, but I haven't looked closely enough to know yet.

]All of this yardwork has resulted in a lot of yard waste. Too much for our weekly trash pick up. I had several piles going in the yard and it was starting to look messy, so I piled it up all in one place as if it is a compost pile. With pieces this large, it would probably take a decade for it actually to decompose, but at least it's all in one centralized location. Maybe I'll get a wood chipper some day and turn it into an actual compost pile.