Living on a slope

The Garden is on a slope adjacent to the cow pasture which is at the top of the slope. During heavy rains, the drainage of the pasture runs through the yard and north wooded area to the lowest point – the gravel driveway. After last week’s epic rain, we now have the driveway repaired again after A LOT of gravel spreading and compacting. The house was built on this slope 20 years ago so there has been 20 years of progressive run off such that there are a lot of exposed tree roots around the beautiful old trees that make mowing around them challenging.

For the past 3 weeks, I have been spending much of my time weeding around the trees where the roots are so prominent that you can’t mow. While they look OK for a short time after weed whacking around them, it doesn’t last long. The weather has been beautiful and I have listened to many wonderful books while I sat or stood and pulled weed after weed – salvaging as much soil for the nested roots as I could. It has been a weed massacre. I have thought about this new phase of my life – the joy and contentment I feel and try to make sense of it all. I can’t really. During much of my professional life I was an educator in one way or another – what my mom’s passion. Now I find myself in a place where I am thinking about soil erosion and conservation – my dad’s passion. He put terraces in his fields to help preserve the soil – sacrificing productivity. When the farm was sold, the terraces were removed. Now Craig and I look at the places the water runs across the yard and woods from the adjacent pasture and plan for simple terracing to prevent future washouts. While we now have much better equipment to manage the driveway, there are many more fun projects to do.

Carol Ann the wood chipper’s engine turned out to be a bit of a mess so Craig spent a lot of time getting her ready for action. It was likely true that it had only been used 6 times several years ago and then just sat after someone put the wrong fuel mixture in the engine. While she is running well, she is a bit persnickety and feeding her is not for the feint of heart. It requires eye protection and ear protection and watching for projectiles to come back out the chute. Really hard wood may get stuck and stop the engine. Seeing the mulch around the first 2 trees was very satisfying.

I am going to chip a lot of cedar to put in this area adjacent to the back deck. I have pulled out all of the tall weeds. Cedar is supposed to be bit of an insect repellent. Our first house project will be to extend the deck over this area, add a hot tub with a door into master bath and screen the deck in. Somewhere at the edge of the screened deck will be a small unscreened deck for an open view of the pasture area. Craig is not a bug magnet as I am so that will be his private deck much of the year.

Once I get the mulching done around the trees there are several areas I want to put some perennial, flowering ground cover. Below are before and after of two of the areas waiting for some colorful ground cover at the front of the house. I have not weeded around this tree yet because that is one of the areas where there was a small amount of poison ivy – waiting a bit longer