Reclaiming The Back Of The Backyard

We have lots of squirrels and birds here, and they eat everything that I plant. We have beautiful blueberry bushes, but seldom get a blueberry. Birds eat the strawberries, Squirrels (?) eat the peaches, grapes, and figs.
So, Bobby and I talked it over, and said “lets try something that makes it harder for the little fellows to get to”, and we are trying the hosta berries and blackberries.
I also have currants and gooseberries planted, and the gooseberries have thorns, too.
When I lived out in western Washington, I picked blackberries every year, so I am used to the thorns. I miss those wonderful huge berries, and am hoping that we can get these berries without all of them being eaten by birds and squirrels.

 

We live in Huntsville, Alabama, which is a fairly good sized city (compared to a 5,000 size); but not like living in a really large city, and we are in town, but in a fairly quiet part of town.
We like the birds and squirrels,too, so we feed them, which helps to accumulate even more of them.
We tried putting netting over the strawberries and found a dead bird trapped there the next day, so we threw away the net, and said we would rather lose the berries than kill little birds.

This is one of the things that I miss about Idaho.
We had squirrels and birds there, too; but they mostly stayed in the woods (we lived out of town), and my garden did good, except for a few foraging deer who ate everything that had green leaves.
Of course, we had water and a salt block out for the deer, too; so I am sure that they felt invited to the garden as well.

 

I don't have a big enough yard to be burning much of anything. Oh, I could get rid of it a little at a time by burning it in a firepit, but large fires wouldn't be very safe here. As for the trains, they were annoying for the first couple of weeks, but then it got so we wouldn't even notice them. For the first ten years or so, they went by pretty regularly. Now that the mill is closed, it's been over a year since one went through; maybe two. I have a couple of spruce trees that we planted as tiny little tykes when we moved here in 2000 or 2001, and they are quite large now. I planted them too close together, which is something that's hard to tell when they are small.

There's nothing to be sorry about.

 

I am moving the compost from my old compost pile to the space between my backyard and the tracks. There's some garbage in it yet, but I'll rake the bulk of it out and cover it all with a couple of layers of clean compost or soil before seeding it with lupines or other wildflowers. The problem with this space was that it is such a sharp incline from the tracks to my yard that everything was washing down into the yard, so I have placed a couple of old pallets and a bunch of scrap lumber on the ground to act as a sort of a terrace, holding the soil in place. Once it all gets buried, it should do well.

Most of what's growing there are wildflowers from last year, so I am trying to cover them gradually so that I don't entirely bury them. Most people don't have to struggle with yards like we do here in Millinocket. My house is on reclaimed land that had been filled in by the paper mill, and my yard sits on a bed of coal ash. This part of town was a seasonal pond, flooded by the overflow of the nearby lake each spring. Until I started building it up, I had only a few inches of topsoil.

Less than two blocks away is our downtown park. In the memory of people who grew up here, that used to be a swimming hole. They used to swim where there is now a gazebo, a veteran's memorial, and a small park, all filled in 40-50 years ago,

 

Working my way down as packets of lupine seeds come in. This took two bags of topsoil and one of manure.

 

I probably won't get the whole back section done this year because I don't have a whole lot of compost left to harvest from my old compost pile, don't feel like hauling a whole bunch of it from the town compost pile (although I might), and can't afford to buy enough of it to complete it. My objective is to fill the space in with my own compost, complete with whatever trash I haven't picked out of it, cover that with an inch or so of topsoil, seed it with lupines, cover the seeds with manure compost, then cover that with a thin layer of peat moss. I expect that the lupines will come up long before the summer is over, but they won't flower. Next year, most of them will again come up, grow much larger, but probably still won't flower, but we'll have flowers from them the following spring and summer.

The green that you see there are mixed wildflowers that I seeded in sporadic places last year. I thought I'd leave them be for the most part, although I have sprinkled some compost and peat moss over them, but not so much as to bury them. If the lupines come out in full force, as I expect they will, considering that they grow wild throughout the state, they will probably crowd out the other wildflowers.

 

I added a third section, and there are probably about two more to go. The nursery was out of peat moss today so I still need to add a layer of peat moss over the third section but, otherwise, the topsoil is in, the seeds are planted, and covered with compost.

I think I'll add a path between the section I just did and the next one. There is a natural path along the fence, on the other side of my shed, but I won't always want to go all the way around, and I won't want to cut through the lupine field once they grow. Maybe I can think of a cheap and lazy way to add steps.

I'd like to cut that leaning tree down. Although it's not dead, I don't like the way it's leaning. However, in the way that it's leaning, getting it down without having it land on my shed could be a problem, since it's practically growing over the top of the shed. Some trees are able to root past the several layers of coal ash in my yard but others lean and eventually fall over. It's not a huge tree, but it's not a sapling either.

 

It was too wet to do much with this site today, although I dumped the last of the compost from my old compost pile there. Depending on the weather, I will probably see if I can find enough topsoil, manure compost, and peat moss to complete the back portion tomorrow or at least do another section of it. I like topping it off with a layer of peat moss but no one had any locally last week. Given that the planting season is over for most people, I might have to see if I can get someone to order some for me. Maybe I'll see if I can think of a way to cut that leaning tree down without collapsing my shed.

 

One of the trees in my backyard is in some danger due to erosion, given that the lot next to me is on a higher level and paved, given that it had once been a taxi company. Although one of the pictures makes it look like this tree is leaning, it's not. It's growing on a sharp incline but it's growing fairly straight.


Given my continued interest in laziness, I'd rather bury my trash than haul it to the city burn area, particularly if I can get some use out of it, I decided to frame the eroded area around the tree with some scrap lumber and bury it. I still need to add some nicer soil over the top of it because this was the last of my old compost pile, and it was almost as much trash as compost. Plus, I didn't have quite enough compost left to bury everything. I'll probably fill in the space between these two trees since the other one is mostly protected by my oldest compost pile, which I was never able to harvest because it was too full of roots.

The lumber will rot but, by then, the soil that I added will be held together with roots.