With our project on hold the mortgage market a mess and summer going we are thinking how we can make our project better and yes dreaming. Or brother-in-law scoped some very cool pools on Daily Green so here are a few of our favorites. We can totally see one of these in front of our house as we sit in an inner tube sipping on Arnold Palmers. Is it too early to start thinking of summer?
We transplanted our trees that was the easy part, the hard part is taking care of them. They needed extra soil to fill in around the hole as well as large stakes and wire to hold them in place plus mulch, it was a great workout moving about 6 cubic yards of material by hand. Watering is an even bigger challenge. We are 2.5 hours away and can't go over everyday to water them. I tried rigging a system with 5 gallon buckets with small holes that will drain collected water slowly but it doesn't really work. It doesn't collect as much water as I'd like and sometimes gets blown away in the wind even with large stones in them. When we are there we have a Well so water is not really an issue but getting it out of the well requires electricity and our small solar panel array is not nearly powerful enough to power the well pump so we have to fire up the generator. Needless to say after watering the trees we don't feel very "Green". We are looking at a few products that will help us with our watering and landscaping needs.
Continue reading "Cool Green Landscaping Products we like!" »
In order to build our house in a location with nice views, good southern exposure, minimal septic construction and shelter from high prevailing winds we've sited the house nestled in the trees. Unfortunately this also means we have to cut down or move some of our lovely Norway Spruces and Scotch Pines. We are trying to not cut down any trees in the process of building our home but it is inevitable that we will, actually we had to cut one down already. One of the solutions was to hire Don Jefts/Native Landscape and Tree Service out of Scotia, NY and have him transplant some of our trees. He has a 60" tree spade and I have to say its one of the most impressive things I've seen in a long time. He came in with a very large truck with an equally large aparatus attached to it and pretty much MOVED the earth and the trees planted on it. We wanted to move about 20 of our trees but we only were able to move six. Turns out most of our trees are just to big to be moved by his machine. For a 60" tree spade the maxium diameter trunk should be no more than 6"; our trees are close to 12" in diameter. If the root ball is not big enough the tree will probably die or even tip over. We were just able to find six trees that his tree spade was able to access easily without hurting trees that wouldn't already be cut down.
