Driveway planting

The majority of our "free time" lately has been devoted to working on the front yard, and we are just amazed at how slow our progress has been. The most recent project has been taking out a holly tree that was in a planting area next to the driveway, improving the soil that area (it was rock-hard in places), and then re-planting.

Here is a picture of the holly tree before.



And here is a "during" shot.



Mike did all the work using a hand saw (he's not very excited by power tools). My job was to pull away the branches and cut them into small enough pieces so they will fit in the yard waste bin. We now have a big pile of holly branches waiting to go in the yard waste. The pile seems to be shrinking only slightly week-by-week.

This week we finally were able to get the area re-planted. Here is the "after" picture.



At the front are drought-tolerant sedums, Spanish lavender, and ornamental grasses--we are hoping that they all do okay with our clay soil.

At the back is a variety of Japanese maple called "tsuma gaki" that we are very excited about. It's an unusual tree and was a bit hard to track down. In its prime in the spring it should look like this:



We're a bit nervous right now as it seems to be having some adjustment problems (the leaves are wilting). According to the Timber Press Pocket Guide to Japanese Maples we may not have been watering it steadily enough the few days since it was planted, so we are trying remedy that situation.

And here's a picture of Koda barking up the wrong tree. Removing this an upcoming project for some unknown point in the future (I don't think Mike will be able to use a hand saw for this one).