Power Washing Florida

 The little known fact about living the "glamorous life" in Florida is that many times, it is not all THAT glamorous.  For example, in addition to keeping doors shut so that lizards and fruit rats do not creep into our house, we also contend with numerous techniques to keep the termites and cockroaches at bay.

And the most glamorous thing of all is that black mold grows on every concrete surface -- be that patio blocks, sidewalks, paver edging, or driveways.  Any where that does not get a high volume of traffic (such as in the middle of the road) eventually will grow mold.

The old pavers needed lots of washing to look new again.

Yesterday Rick replaced the carburetor in our power washer so that he could power wash the pavers we put behind two of the storage sheds in the back yard.  We want to paint the pavers the same color as the new concrete that we installed, but paint does not stick well to mold growing on pavers.  So his first job was to power wash the mold off the pavers in preparation for painting tomorrow.  We checked the pavers today, but they were still damp, so we will give them another day to dry before Rick adds paint.  The paint will protect the surfaces from future mold.

In the meantime, another glamorous job of the spring is raking leaves from the live oak tree.  The leaves of a live oak are small, oval-shaped, and have a waxy consistency.  They are hard to get out of the grass, and we seem to have an overabundance of them this year.  

I call this time of the year "Sprall" since it is both spring and fall.  The new spring buds on the trees force the old leaves of last year to fall off.  What a mess!  We bagged five 30-lb. bags of leaves last weekend, and we added another two 30-lb. bags of leaves today.  We only raked about a third of the yard, so if we wanted to add more, we certainly could do so.

Rick hits the dirt at the edge of the driveway
as he power washes off the mold. (That line
of darker pavement in front of him is not a shadow.
The black color is mold.)

After lunch today, Rick went back outside to power wash the mold off the driveway.  The picture shows him hard at work at that task, and the splattered mud shows he got a little to close to the grass along the edge of the driveway.  I will say, though, that power washing is a great way to blast out any weeds that are trying to grow in the joints between sections of the drive.

Temperatures are climbing toward today's high of 82, so I do not expect that he will be in the sun working too much longer.  Whatever he does not finish today certainly will wait for our attention tomorrow.

Finishing Touches

 Yesterday we spent quite a few hours adding landscape fabric to the new backyard garden.  Since the garden is over 50 feet long, we could not run the fabric down the garden in one strip.  Instead, we had to cut one yard pieces and piece them into the garden as we fit them around each plant.  The fabric is heavy, so it hopefully will cut down on the weeds.

Heavy landscape fabric covers the new garden.

Rick had ordered red cedar rock for the garden to match the rock in our other gardens. The company who supplied and delivered the rock also offered the rental of a hopper which would be filled with the rock, so that all we would have to do was position a wheelbarrow under the hopper chute, push down the lever, and the rock would pour into the wheelbarrow.  That sounded like a much easier way to load a wheelbarrow than by shoveling rock into the wheelbarrow from a heap of stones in the driveway.  We were supposed to get the hopper and stone delivered "around noon" today.

Our hopper was the second to be delivered
today by the landscape company.

This morning at 8:00, we received a phone call from a driver who said that he would be dropping off the hopper and the stone "in about a half an hour."  Oka-a-a-y.  We quickly changed into our work clothes, and Rick moved our car out of the driveway.  The driver was timely as he dropped off the hopper and the stone.

The hopper made quick, easy work
of loading the wheelbarrow with stone.

That's when the work really started.  We filled the wheelbarrow and walked it back to the backyard.  Rick dumped it into the garden and started to spread it around while I went back to the driveway to get another load of stone.  We worked until noon, and then took a break for lunch.

After lunch we finished unloading all of the stone, adding stone to one of the back corner gardens and some the last of the stone into the garden in front of our kitchen windows.  We finished that work by 1:30.  

The garden is complete!

While Rick washed down the stone, washed out the hopper, and cleaned up the driveway and pavers from the wheelbarrow tracks, I grabbed a rake and filled a bag full of leaves that we had blown out of the corner gardens.  

Earlier in the week, we had purchased paint to tint the concrete that we had laid in front of the fence to protect it from getting cut by weed-whackers welded by our landscape folks.  While I came in to shower, Rick painted the concrete in front of the north fence.

We decided on a creamy light brown
color to match the pavers that lead to the back yard.

We now have a completed garden, fresh stone in various places, a somewhat raked lawn, and half of the painting completed in the back yard.  We are pleased with the results.

Next week Monday we get the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine against Covid-19.  We were warned that some people experience side effects from the second vaccine, so we wanted to complete this outdoor work before the weekend.  That way we can lay low on Monday afternoon and Tuesday in case either of us do not feel well after the vaccine.  We can just sit back and enjoy our new garden in the back yard.

Garden Glory

 Last week we were looking at a lot of work to protect our bare vinyl fence from getting cut to pieces by weed-wackers.  This week, we are looking forward to finishing the job.

The bare fence did its job by giving us privacy from the neighbors.  It enclosed our property, kept the neighbor's dog from seeing us (and thus barking at us) when we were trying to relax in the back yard, and it was easy to access and to clean.  However, the landscape people did take a toll on it, and frankly, it was boring to view.

The boring white fence started to look
better just with the edgers installed and
the grass and weeds removed.

So last week we bought the edgers and Rick killed his back laying them into place.  At the end of the week, we both worked hard to remove the grass and weeds within the garden.  Thankfully, our city services are great at hauling the debris away each week.

On Friday we traveled around to see where we could get the best flowers.  Surprisingly, the Lowe's right here in town had the healthiest looking shrubs and flowers.  I will not buy any annual flowers.  Most bloom the best through the spring and summer, and we just are not around long enough to take care of them all.  So bushes and perennials are our choice.

Early on Saturday morning, before the crowds were awake, we made our first of four trips to Lowe's to buy all of the plants we wanted to put into the garden.  We anchored the ends of the garden with one Podocarpus on each side.  They are taller than the rest of the plants and will give us an evergreen bushy tree on each end.

The taller Podocarpus is followed across the yard
by the same pattern of plants for symmetry.

Since the house itself is surrounded by various Crotons, Arboricola, Ti plants, and Ixora, we purposely avoided buying any more of those shrubs.  Instead, as we moved across the garden, we added a small, rounded yellow-leafed bush called a Duranta Gold Mound.  That was followed by a red President Hibiscus.  Then we planted another Duranta Gold Mound and a purple, spiky Cordyline Dracena at each fence post.  We followed that pattern all across the garden, ending with the Podocarpus at the end. 

The garden as I look north to our other corner garden.

The garden as I look south toward the large oak tree.

We now have green, red, gold, and purple in the garden offering a variety of textures, heights, and shapes as the eye travels down the line.  

Our "mistake" turned into a delightful
addition to our front garden.

We are hoping for bright flowers
on our new little hibiscus plant.

We made one mistake: as I was taking one of the hibiscus out of its pot, I noticed that the tag on it was different.  Although the blossom on the hibiscus was the same color as all of the other plants, the tag read "Hibiscus Trio -- three different colored plants in one pot."  Oops!  We wanted symmetry in the back garden, so back to Lowe's we went to get the correct variety of hibiscus.  We actually kept the trio, though, and planted it in the corner of the front garden since the Firecracker plant that we had planted there died from too much sun.  We hope the sun-loving hibiscus will survive and add a little color to the corner.

Today we found landscape stone that we will have delivered later this week after we get the landscape fabric fitted around each of the 21 plants in the back garden.  With the one hibiscus in the front, that means we planted 22 plants all together.  Our muscles will attest to the truth of that statement.

We hope that we do not have too much planted too closely together.  If we do see crowding as they grow, we can always move some plants elsewhere.  We just hope they all survive this first year in the ground! 

Rick smiled this morning as he opened the Florida room blinds and saw not a blank white fence, but rather  a wonderful splash of textures and colors bordering that fence.

Necessity Garden

 Sometimes the actions of one person force others to make accommodations with surprisingly happy results.  Such is the case with the landscaping around Gladys.

When we bought this property 10 years ago, Gladys had a paltry four-flower rose garden next to the front, heaved-up, uneven sidewalk and a wild jungle of invasive pepper trees, towering cactus, dying palm trees, a leaning "ear" tree, and other overgrown or dead shrubs filling half of the back yard.  In cutting down the trees, digging out the shrubs, and pruning back what remained, we gained an additional area about six feet deep spanning the entire width of the back yard.  

Since we were not here in the summer and had no place to store lawn care equipment, we hired a lawn service.  We fired the initial man after he charged us for summer lawn care that he did not do, and we hired a much more reputable firm that we use to this day.  Sadly, no one is perfect.

A hired man for the second lawn service trimmed too near to the house, chipping off all the paint.  To remedy that situation, we planted flower gardens all around the house.  Now the house is safe, the paint remains intact, and we have flowers to make Gladys look pretty.  Wherever we do not have flowers, concrete touches the house.  So the careless landscaper was the reason we now have beautiful shrubs and flowers surrounding the house.

Now we face the same situation in the back yard.  Trimming next to the vinyl fence is causing cuts into the posts of the fence.  To keep the string trimmers away from the north and south fences, we added a strip of concrete; however, I did not want that along the back fence.  Instead, we are adding yet another flower garden. 

A few days ago we bought edgers.  Rick dug a trench into which he built a wall for our new garden.

Rick started the garden against the
corner garden on the northeast corner 
of our back yard.

The most important thing was to make sure
that the edgers were level.

The garden will come out three feet from the back fence.

 We took the garden from one corner garden to right below the large live oak tree.  We had to stop short of the oak tree due to all of the large, underground roots of the tree.  Adding edgers any closer would not have done any good since the roots would just push them up each year anyway.

The garden edge curves to a close just shy of the tree.

Lots of digging eventually will leave us
with a level garden into which we can add beautiful plants.

I started to dig out the weeds and grass on the inside of the garden and got about half-way before we had to quit for the day.  Of course, the following day we had rain, followed by cold and lots of wind.  We have not been outside since that time to finish the garden, even though we do have landscape fabric waiting to go down.

We can wait, though, since we probably should wait another week or so before we plant anything.  We want to get the shrubs and flowers in early enough so they take root before we go north for the summer, but we don't want to plant too early and have the flowers freeze.  

We have more finishing work to do, and we will soon get that done.  Then once again, necessity to protect the fence will result in a beautiful addition to our landscape.