Gropius and I have spent the past several weekends on a major landscaping project that has involved quite a bit of manual labor, especially on Gropius's part. We have taken out the sidewalk that went around the side of our house, along with the roses. Gropius used a 10lb sledgehammer to bust up the concrete sidewalk and then he, Lulu, and I carried buckets of it over to the garden in the backyard. (she's big into the "monkey see-monkey do" phase right now and started spontaneously helping) Why? To use as the base for some pebbled pathways (eventually).
We are letting the larger pieces settle into the dirt before we will in the spaces with sand and smaller pebbles. We are just excited that we no longer have to get muddy to walk around the garden!
Once that was done, the side of our house looked like this:
The more astute of you may notice that we also took out the rose bushes that were there along the sidewalk, too. Gropius and I (mostly Gropius though) broke up the hard-packed clay soil and we amended it with "soil-buster," compost, fertilizer, etc. so that our trees will grow more easily:
Lulu helping shovel
Gropius planting the Moro blood orange tree
Lulu was a very interested assistant in the proceedings as you can tell from the fact that she's in almost every picture:
We went and got some 24" square paving stones, pea gravel, and a creeping thyme as a groundcover so that the finished product looks like this:
Hopefully we will be enjoying
Moro blood oranges,
Palestinian sweet limes,
St Teresa lemons, and
Rangpur limes. I'd still like to persuade Gropius to plant a Mexican key lime in a large pot on the back patio, but that may have to wait a while...I think he's through with planting trees for a while!
