Plants and Animals

It's becoming clear that some landscape simplification will be required.  The woman who used to live here really enjoyed gardening.  She was out everyday with the clippers and other equipment.  It appears that the planting paradigm here is to plant many things close together including trees that are going to get really big.  Anyway, we have one dead pyramidalis and three sick ones in the back yard.  It's odd that they're doing so poorly, generally they are a hardy plant.  However, these are not - so I guess we'll be cutting them down.  We can't replace them, someone else would have to dig out the root ball, so we may just take them out and not plant new.  Getting a stump grinder back there would require driving over the neighbor's yard, which is a non starter.

We decided to give the hibiscus another chance at life.  This is why.  There is a gas fireplace in the living room.  This is the exhaust for said fireplace.  Talk about unattractive.  So, we thought maybe the hibiscus should be spared because it camouflages the exhaust.  It's a really large, unattractive thing.  There's a lot going on in this picture.  Look at the bottom and notice all of the dessicated white things.  Those are dried up dropped blossoms, laying in the lava rock.  That's a problem because lava rock is very light weight, so you can't take the blower to it.  So, after cutting the bush back, we picked up all of the debris with our fingers.  You can also see the window well in the picture.  It's full of decaying blossoms.  Jim's response to today's clean up is that he's doing this once.  I think the hibiscus is toast.  We're on the hunt for some sort of a screen to go in front of the vent.

This was yesterday.  This plant was massively overgrown and invading the front porch.  We took the brand new hedge trimmer to it.  The trimming is not the problem, it's picking up all of the plant bits. 

We also did the hedge.  It was pressing up against the house, which is bad for the house.  Since I am the smaller person, I cut my way in next to the house with the trimmer.  Trimming is fun, picking up the bits, not so much.

This neighborhood has many very large rocks.  If you look mid photo you can see a water feature, cascading down a giant rock.  I need to get out and get some pictures of them, they're just amazing.  Anyway, I'm not clear on how this recirculates.  There are many water features on the street.  We have one, but it's turned off and is full of algae.  We're afraid to turn it on until we clean it out.  I did buy the little floating things that kill the mosquito larvae.  They work!

Yesterday we saw a cat stalking a group of 7 or 8 quail.  We thought the quail would fly away, or at least run.  But no, they turned and faced the cat and started yelling at it.  The cat backed down.  People let their cats out here.  I haven't seen that in eons.  Tucson had too many coyotes, cats make good dinner.  There are three cats that roam our cul de sac.  There are almost no birds, so I guess they're not going to extinct any breeds.

Later I saw movement out of a window.  There were wild turkeys in the side yard.

They walked around to the front yard and moseyed on off back into the woods.

We've been told there are white tailed deer here, but generally they are not too destructive.  I was not expecting turkeys in the side yard, or the quail. 

I saw this photo on twitter.  Can you imagine what it feels like to walk off the airplane and in to a new world?  These people are so brave.

 
So, we're tired once again. Since we got here, we've been sleeping very well.