If you give a mouse a cookie....

Some people are not familiar with this great children's story, so here you go.



Last weekend we decided to finally tackle the hedge & privacy issue. The neighbours's gardeners had planted 11 foot tall cedars.

Nice.

But the V's! See all those gaps in the V's at the top of the trees. Yeah, they'll fill in, but when?

We pondered this for a while & decided that we would plant a second row of hedging, zig zagging it on our side to fill in the V's a bit. Not only would this speed up the filling in of the hedge, it would have the added benefit of having a hedge on OUR side of the fence, and as we've discovered, that's a big deal to us. "On our side" means we can decide how tall to let it grow, and "on our side" means that neighbours (these or new owners down the line) can't decide to just chop it down.

After much to'ing and fro'ing, we finally got things sorted out, got the name of the nursery where one can buy these giant trees, and rented a truck to pick some up. (we did briefly consider having them a) delivered and b) installed but the price was too high, and once it became clear that no heavy equipment can get in that area & this is a job that needs to be done by hand, the price went even higher.)

Roo went to pick them up & as an added benefit got to actually select them, picking nice and healthy ones, and one especially large one for the big hole we were particularly bugged by. The nursery loaded them into the truck with a giant claw thing.

Of course the first challenge was to get them out of the truck. We had this idea that we'd just pull them out on tarps and drag them to the back. There was a bit of a set back when both Roo and I put our backs into it, gave it the big  heave-ho - and didn't even budge the tree. See, the damned things weigh about 300 lbs and the big one was probably closer to 400. They're big, and long, and don't really seem to have anything to hang on to.

Eventually, with the help of levers and wheels, and inclined planes (science rules!), we figured out a method of getting them off the truck & moving them the 60 feet to the back. There was much grunting and sweating but we were doing quite well and overall feeling pleased with progress. Until, on the last tree, the deck collapsed.

 

This is the small deck out the back door from the garage (& it's the one that I had planned to use as a grooming platform in my last post)

Fortunately nobody was hurt and we stood back to take pictures and ponder our next step, which ended up being ripping it out and just using the ramp which we had been placing on the stairs to drag the last tree to the yard.

 

Here Roo & Hugo are dismantling some of the bolts holding the old railing on.

So now, our hedge project had grown to include rebuilding a deck.

But the trees were finally in the yard, and the truck was cleaned & returned.

 

There they are, parked against the fence (pretty much where THEY chose to land because moving these suckers around is like dancing with King Kong. Seriously, our best method of moving them on grass involves pirouetting them into position. Let me tell you they tread on your feet & stick their arms in all sorts of private places....). Hugo who is I think around 5'5"/164 - is standing by for scale.

We knocked off on Friday night just a bit bummed by the broken deck but philosophical about it. It had needed some work anyway as I've been trying to find ways to stop the dogs from 'dock jumping' onto the grass instead of using the stairs when they got the zoomies. Large chunks of the deck are salvageable and we'd just need new supports and stairs.

The one who missed the deck most was Darwin as he loves that little side yard & races around there looking for birds. It's now off limits, gated off with the old screen we use to keep the cat from going off the deck (benefits of having an ancient arthritic cat is that a 1 m barricade completely locks her in). Darwin keeps looking hopefully over the edge, puzzled at the huge hole at his feet.

On Saturday I took Hugo to fencing class in the morning. Roo was going to dig out the old hedges and park them somewhere, and start digging the big holes. Once I got home at lunch, we'd start planting the big trees.



That was the plan.