Good faith effort

ETA: My tree guy just called. He has some time tomorrow morning so he and his worker will come out, check out the brushpiles, call with an estimate, and if everything is agreeable, the brushpiles will be GONE by midday. My tree guy is *awesome*.

Hopefully that means this is almost sorted and I can go down to the city Tuesday afternoon with photos of the cleaned-up areas and ask (respectfully of course) to have my property taken off the agenda.

(I'm thinking the city may use what is, for a person like me, needlessly draconian language because there are a few people who would ignore a notice from the city to cut their lawn or something without the threat of fines. But for a rule-follower like me, it makes me feel all squidgy and bad and like that "permanent record" that we worried about in school still exists but is now part of the city bureaucracy. Still, the employees COULD be nicer when you talk to them on the phone, IMHO...)


I sincerely hope. I didn't take "before" pictures as I just wanted to get into it, and I am going to assume the city has them if they really want to prove my yard was a pit. But. This is what I did this weekend:



That brushpile is almost as tall as I am. I started hauling it out to the street when I thought that maybe bulky waste would take it (forgetting that we only get bulky waste once a month, unlike my parents' town, where it's weekly). But it will be easy for my tree guy to haul off this way.



This is a second, smaller brushpile by my back fence. I'm assuming that the lock on the fence is still workable so that when the tree guy comes, I can just unlock the gate for him. If not, they can probably throw it over the fence into the trailer.

But this means that there is now NOTHING leaning on the back edge of my fence, or on the fences shared with neighbors. (It was unclear where the "leaning sapling" was so I just went for destruction:)





Nothing touching the fence. ("Can't touch this....fence"?)

I also got rid of the one patch of grass that could have been construed as "tall." Its tallest height was about 6" and it's at 12" we're supposed to get in trouble over. (It makes me think about the raunchy old joke about why women are bad at estimating lengths, based on the lengths of.....things....men have claimed.)



And I ripped stuff out. Oh, did I rip stuff out. All the gardens in the backyard have been weeded.



(That tall stuff is fennel and I'll be hanged if I cut that down. Considering that people have bahia grass and even cane that gets taller than this.)





They look kind of sad and crummy right now. If I had more energy and didn't fear I was going to have to spend a lot of money in the near future on whatever (I'm guessing the next complaint will be that my garage needs to be painted), I'd get some plants and put them in.

Also, yeah, I need to get the pecan catkins off my roof but I think I need to hire someone for that (No idea what the job title is for someone who goes up on a roof and clears it off). I'm not so steady on ladders any more.



And that's what came out of those gardens (plus some from the back of the lot). Six and a half lawn-sized bags. No, I don't have room in my roll cart for them; not sure what I'm going to do. Maybe beg the use of a pickup for an hour and drive them down to the dump myself. (It's mostly dayflower.)

I'm filthy and I smell and I have a bite or sting on my neck (I thought it was a fire ant but looking at it in the mirror I think it's actually an halictid bee; it doesn't have the characteristic fire-ant blister and it hurt way out of proportion to its size)

I couldn't bring myself to hit the one last area I wanted to hit, the narrow garden on the north side of the house. And this is why I tell people who think of moving to the South for gardening to think very, very hard: I had this area pretty well cleared a MONTH ago.  The tall stuff in the far background are my rosemary bushes, so this is kind of looking the opposite way from the sixth photo in the series.



I'm hoping the city will allow a little leniency on that for a while. Because my Monday task (sigh) is going to be to mow the lawn again; it's starting to get taller then the 3-4" I prefer.

Also, I really want the burst blisters to heal a little before I mess with pulling stuff again. (No photos as it's really gross and I don't want to squick people out.)

I estimate that between Friday, yesterday, and today, I probably put in close to 10 hours working on this.