Landscape Saturday 6

First off, cheers to the LAST of our "old" backyard junk being dragged out to the curb! This is what our street curb has looked like, weekly, for a while:

This most recent set was coming from a bigger pile that was almost as tall as
our house and looked like...

...This.  It required being cut down into neat bunches and dragged to the curb every
Wednesday for city pickup...

What I'm saying is, if I never drag another tree trunk to the curb in my life it won't be too soon!

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In other landscape progress, we addressed the really expansive brick wall in front of our house (as you can see from the top pic on this post). The brick is driving me crazy because it doesn't connect to the house at all. You can't paint a brick wall — at least can't paint it well — because it gets so dirty.

And while this would be my dream replacement wall, it just isn't in the budget anytime soon.

We decided the best thing for now is to let small-leafed climbing fig grow to cover the brick wall.

Here's how we started with the fig:

Purchased 9 pots of climbing fig like this...

My dad helped us knock out strategically placed bricks and insert the fig in them.
(Warning: The brick knocking-out part is not as easy as it looks.) 

We then used an auger bit to drill into the soil over the wall and connect the holes.
This is so the water will easily flow down to where the climbing fig is.

We did this in 9 places down the length of our wall.
There is currently not much to see but eventually it will look like this:

If we keep watering :)

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And finally, right before Memorial Day weekend we got a big pile of mulch for the newly cleared backyard:

Almost as tall as our garage doors, this really put a damper on parking in our driveway!

Saturday started at about 8:30 am with us cutting landscape fabric and staking it in the ground.
We got around the whole yard and called it quits around 2 pm — mulch untouched and exhausted.

My dad shows up about 2:30 and unannounced, starts wheeling mulch out onto the fabric.
Not ones to deny the help we went back out again. Ended up getting about 2/3 of the yard covered. 

And the rest to come this weekend... 

We're seeing the light at the end of the backyard tunnel for sure.