Playing In The Dirt, Again

The old crab apple trees were never my favorite part of the landscape. They provided some privacy, but they always looked sad. They were well past their prime. I'd been angling for some time for SWMBO to let me cut them down.

Needless to say, I wasn't terribly upset when the falling oak took them out. And over the weekend I got my wish.

Saturday was a pretty boring day. While everyone else was doing other stuff, I cut the grass, weeded many of the annual &perennial beds, dead-headed various flowers, and weed-killed the boulevards so I can re-seed them later in the year.

And had a little bonfire with the sticks and fallen branches from the yard.

During my bonfire respite, I contemplated my dirty fingers from the day's work. At least I still have all my fingers after all these years of projects.

Sunday the little man (who is already as big as me) and I went to buy the trees I've had my eye on.

Because we had other commitments on Sunday, I couldn't plant them until tonight.

And now I have my own little edible fruit orchard.

• Sweet Sixteen apple
• Honeycrisp apple
• Polly peach

All are dwarf varieties and winter hardy here. The peach is self-fertile so it doesn't need a pollinator. It'll probably take a couple of years before we get any signification amount of fruit, but I'm not in a hurry.

I'll probably have to dig out the pair of Taunton Yews along the wall. They have always been completely protected from the sun and now that the space gets full sun, they've gotten pretty crispy and won't survive.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

The step at the ends of both our sidewalks have slowly been crumbling apart.

We'd got bids for repairing this and a couple of other things and finally pulled the trigger on this part of the repair.

The guys called early one day to say that they had a hole in their schedule and would be over later in the day.  We were a bit surprised that the work was happening so soon, but otherwise we had no issues.

Day one they broke out the old step and day two the poured the new ones.

They did a great job reproducing the old profile so we don't have issues with the HPC.

They also fixed the one on the north side (right edge of the photo).