Sunday, October 12, 2008

It's Been Almost a Year ...Then and Now Photos

On the left is a Tamarind tree and the next biggest stick is an avocado. There were a couple mini-waterfalls and lots of sediment collecting in the grass.


This is what the area looks like now - a little cleaner with much larger trees! You can see the clumps of ornamental grass I've planted and the little wall that does a decent job collecting dirt. The wall only took a couple days to build...these blocks are great!

This area was even more overgrown - this shows it post weeding and dividing.

Here it is cleaned up. I've relocated the pots and used them for different things. I've re-stacked the rock wall and brought in rocks from up top and divided and moved and pruned things! Not much soil here though so it is hard to grow much until I build the soil up (which isn't on my list).


Here's the driveway when we first bought the house - In Puerto Rico they weed whack to the ground. We understand why - the way things grow it buys you some time. We don't do that though because we don't want to watch the soil run into the road, down to the river and out to the sea where it will smother the reef system.

In an effort to keep soil where it is we built a wall and I am still planting things to help hold soil. The "Trinitaria" (aka bougainvillea) is growing slowly since it is a little wet and you can barely see little grey sticks just past the gate that will grow up to about 6 or 8 feet and hide the waterlines. On the right just after the gate I am slowly putting in croton cuttings as I get them to root. So those are some of the things we've done around the house.

4 comments:

Fran and Steve said...

As I recall, this was one of your challenging areas that you really didn't care too much about. Now it looks like part of a beautiful botanical garden. I like the rock border as much as the block border. Fran

James Johnson said...

Wow! It's amazing to see how much you've done in a year. Nice job.
My house should look so good.
Jim

Anonymous said...

Thanks - most of the real work is stuff you can't tell has been done - cutting stumps, cutting the "bad" trees, pulling vines, and preparing the land for future things - paths and plantings. It is a learning process for sure! If you leave something alone for a month it is like starting over. katrina

Anonymous said...

Beautiful.
~Sarah~