Working on the Back Yard - Part 5 of X

Let's see...what to blog about this week...oh, I haven't done any yard updates since mid-May!  Let's do this!  In the last update, I'd made it to late January (the blogs about the yard may soon lap themselves at this rate), when our most recent yard improvement project was reworking some of the decomposed granite (DG) in the front yard and replacing it with rock to help with water flow.

Eventually, it stopped raining here, and we started eyeing the area next to the block wall in the back yard where we built the retaining wall last November.  We wanted to put mulch in this area, but every mulch option we found cost a whole freaking lot of money (why is mulch so much?!?).  While searching Yelp for something random, I stumbled across a review for the City of Long Beach Mulch Yard, which was conveniently just a few miles away from us.  We drove down there one morning in late March with the pickup truck and for free (as city residents, we can have as much as we want - hooray!) filled up the truck and took it home for our use.


At the mulch yard.
Before you even ask,
of course I climbed to the top of the pile.
I can only imagine Chris was
cajoling me to be careful and come down,
instead of taking pictures,
as he should have done.

The mulch yard is an interesting place - it's just a few huge piles of mulch dumped by the tree removal crews in the parking lot for a small city park - and as long as the gates are open, you come and take as much as suits your needs.  All sorts of people come by to fill up containers and vehicles including random homeowners like us as well as other folks with more commercial and/or larger-scale interests.  Normally, everyone just nods at one another and continues shoveling mulch, but every now and then, you inadvertently engage a full on Long Beach Weirdo (LBW, for short).

Our first LBW encounter was one Sunday morning; we arrived at the yard on the early side of the day and started shoveling away, as is our normal practice.  About 10 minutes into our session, a wiry older gentleman drove up in a smaller pickup filled with gray trash cans.  Not wanting to be standoffish, when he hailed us, we waved back and exchanged pleasantries.  Oh, bad idea, Olsens.  The gentleman then proceeded to give us a lengthy (at least 30-45 minutes, easy) lecture on raising all of his own food (not a problem - this is SoCal, after all) and corporate greed and unhealthy practices in modern, large-scale farming (okay, getting rant-y, but still with you, sir) to how God came to him one day (literally, not metaphorically) and told him the path to heaven was apparently through free mulch and tomatoes, attempting to get us to come home with him to help him praise the Lord while on his farm (all right, we're out).  We politely listened to him as we shoveled, eventually wishing him a good day and heading home.  

A few Sundays later, we were back at the mulch yard and working away when he pulled up.  This time, we frantically started shoveling faster, hoping to finish up before he engaged us.  We thought we were safe, until as we were packing up, he wandered over and started speaking to Chris, using the exact same speech we'd heard just a few weeks prior (the mulch yard must be fertile ground for recruiting, I guess).  I grabbed my phone, did the "oh no, look at the time!" polite fake out, and we hopped in the truck to escape.  We don't go to the mulch yard on Sundays anymore.

Anywhoodle, we made it back home with our pile of mulch, backed the truck behind the gate, and started carting it into the raised bed.


Woah!  That's a lotta mulch!
We've since moved to lining the truck bed
with the tarp before loading the mulch in,
and this makes cleanup a lot easier.


Canine assistance always required.

It took us another trip to the mulch yard to really add the amount we were looking for (it didn't help that someone kept pulling the larger sticks out of the piles and munching them down to chips), but we eventually ended up with a full section:


Not bad, right?

In mid-April, we got back into the yard once again to extend our retaining wall project, creating a border around the bamboo we planted back in late October.  We did just one level of timbers for this wall, since it's not planted on a rise like the back section of the yard.


Another yard project,
another day in my Aravaipa shirt.
Also, still in flip flops, I see.


The engineer measuring and measuring again.


The same shot from a bit further away,
for a sense of scope.

At this time, we also moved the garden box to a much more successful location.  We originally put it near the western fence line, figuring it would get morning sun and afternoon shade, which worked well for us in Arizona.  However, given that it's neither 1) quite so sunny or 2) quite so hot here as in our old part of AZ, our garden never really took off properly.  Additionally, this location ended up getting dumped on by the pepper tree in the back yard, as tons of pollen and leaves from its canopy likely choked out anything trying to come up from seed.  

We first moved the box frame itself to a new spot a few feet away from the back retaining wall, and then we proceeded to move the dirt from the old pile, finding another issue along the way.  In this area, we're really prone to Japanese beetles, and indeed, they had fully taken over our old garden location.  Trigger warning ahead if you're freaked out by insects:


They really are pretty dudes.
I love this one's festive antennae.
They're like tiny little jazz hands.

Instead of the actual beetles, however, what we found were their larvae, laying in wait in the soft, loamy garden dirt, likely dining out upon our poor plants.  We started picking them out and throwing them away one by one as we moved the dirt from spot to spot and although we didn't count each one, we easily murdered at least a few hundred in the process.  Yes, seriously.  It's a good thing we're not scared by grubs; I would have had nightmares for weeks.

Here's the garden in its new location:


Happy plants!
Three different tomatoes on the left,
parsley, zucchini, crookneck squash, and cucumbers in the middle,
and basil and jalapenos on the right.


Teeny, tiny tomatoes!


The back wall area as seen from the garage.

I don't believe I'm spoiling much when I say that we saw HUGE returns from the garden this summer, particularly from the tomatoes, the zucchini, the peppers, and the basil.  This was a typical weekly harvest in mid-July or so:


I canned diced tomatoes,
I made marinara,
I made tomato soup,
I oven dried tons of them,
and of course, with the basil,
we ingested an awful lot of caprese salad.

On the next back yard blog, we use more timbers to build yet another planting area on the western side of the yard, and we start working on a patio!

Later!

Amy

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