A few years on, some greenery, and a new exterior color

It's been ages, probably years since my last post. Last spring here I finally got around to painting the house in blackboard charcoal, almost black. The results frankly were all I had envisioned and more. Since we now have some greenery to frame the house, the popping effect works all the better.

We feel we have come so far in terms of progress with the yard that we're now even worrying about flowers! And we had quite a lot of blooming this summer. The gauras, both massive patches, have been a 6-month source of happiness. We had them chopped recently and they are still blooming.

The tulbaghias, both a purple patch and a white patch, are still in bloom and developed quite some volume after their spring planting.

The yellow broom retamas that we have planted outside our fence in large numbers, probably over a hundred, have grown large on the portion along the road, and to my surprise have been blooming since the spring. I guess it's the sprinklers... In the picture on the top of this post, behind the pool solar panels, there's a massive mound of retamas in bloom... Those were there before us...

The oleanders, also more than a hundred, are in different stages of growth, but the ones around the house are quite bushy and healthy, about 4 to 5 feet high and 3 to 4 feet across, and also had a very happy summer, thanks to the drought.

We have amassed quite a collection of ornamental grasses whose names I don't remember. Some varieties have thrived and grown massive, to 6 feet in height and produced a dense wall. One that stands out is the leymus blue dune, which is low in height but has an amazing spiky look and a fantastic blue-grey color.

Lastly, we have become obsessed with growing vegetables, especially tomatoes. We had quite the variety this summer, and particularly loved our green, black and yellow tomatoes, and all the delicious squash and zucchini (many varieties) that we ate all summer. The peppers we're finally getting to understand.

Barbi hard at work on our tomatoes

A long due update

Back by popular demand: Lunes

Here she is, on MY couch, posing for the camera while covered by a velvet blanket, befitting the spoiled model that she is.

 

 Melancholy...

  

...and aloofness, ain't she a natural?

The kids

Collie is always in a state of agitation when around us, except if allowed to come in the house, where she mellows out and proceeds to nap. Outside she constantly chases Oso, as if he were a lamb, calculating trajectories when he's running back with the ball, intercepting him at an angle and biting him on the front legs. She also growls nastily at Lunes, showing lots of white teeth, when she perceives our attention is being diverted to Lunes. She's still quite small in size, below average for the breed. Must be her chronic respiratory problems.

 

A really red cardenal bird near our house

  

No amount of petting is ever enough for Fabiana, our outer perimeter dog.

  

No longer shy, Shakshuka now comes out to greet us and say goodbye to us when we leave, and is very relaxed scratching Lunes' snout when the evil one comes to attack her. Fearless and cuddly.

  

Ah, the psycho Zeytin. She follows everywhere we go, meowing away, and trying to climb up our legs. She also steals Fabiana's dead rodents and the other dogs' food.

  

 Oso, with short hair and in full alert mode, waiting for the ball to be thrown...

 

And retrieving the ball, closely followed by Collie...

The plants, one year later

Many of the millions of things we started planting in August 2008 perished, others barely survived, and yet others thrived.

I have pictures of the ones that have done well and are coming back strong this spring. Some of them have been in the yard for less than a year, as we have never stopped planting, really.

Gauras were my first flower flower, planted just for the flower, and my mom's gift as well. We planted 70 of them at the end of last summer, and they were tiny. Now they have grown so much you can measure growth by the day. We are adding another 35 to join the two patches that were formerly separated by a fence.

The guavas are native to Uruguay and do extremely well in our yard. We have about 8 or 10 of them.

The inga is another native tree, a gift to us from the owners of Pachamama nursery. It's doing sell, slow but steady growth and doesn't show much damage after nasty storms.

The Tunberghi pine (sure I got the spelling wrong) is a Japanese pine tree that grows bushy and not tall at all, and has done very well in our yard. We tried one out, then added about 6 more. We may add more yet.

Jazmin de leche is a creeper variety that withstands all the punishment in our garden. Other varieties didn't make it, but the four we planted of this type are doing great, lots of new leaves.

In search for diversity in terms of bushes, Isabella suggested the melaleuca, which has a flower like the bottlebrush but white, and whose new leaves come out pink. It suffered a lot during the frosts and tough winter, but it's coming back with a vengeance, and the pink leaves look gorgeous up front and in the distance. There' a large section planted with them, about 25 bushes I think. That's Zeytin's tail on the bottom of the picture.

Acacia trinervis, impervious to our bad soil (clay), strong winds and salt air. Doesn't like it when pruned though, I've seen three older ones in our yard become half dead after pruning, so will have to consult with Agustin and Isabella on how to keep them alive when we want to trim them to form a sort of wall. They grow super fast.

The canelon is a native tree, we found it after clearing a mess of brush last year. It has been punished on the sea side, where it has much fewer leaves, but we hope that as the acacia trinervis "wall" grows, it will block the tougher southern winds and give it a chance to get bushier.

The purple-leaved dodonea planted last November has done extremely well. We decided the guy who planted had set them in too straight a line, so we added a few more a couple of months ago for design purposes, those are the skinny ones on the front, which gives us a before and after look at how the original ones did.

Espina de la cruz is a local cactus type bush that is very hardy, has the most incredible folliage in the shape of a cross, and the most deliciously fragrant flower. Also native to our yard. Our dumb former gardeners pruned them in their mutilating style, so now this one looks like a ridiculous little tree, not their natural shape, which is much more irregular and bushy. I'm told it will grow back.

Our fig tree got so confused with the summer in the middle of the winter that it produced a fig in August, equivalent to getting figs in February in the nothern hemisphere. As Isabella said, "Poor thing, she's so stressed." We're impressed by how hardy this one is, and we did get a few figs last year already, so we're planning on getting a few more.

Partition and annexation

Both the above are views of the lot we bought last year but had not yet integrated to the rest of the property. They had some landscaping against the road, and were unfenced.

This is Omar, our fence builder, and the new fence he put up separating the two lots where the house and pool are sited from the lots fronting on the main road. With a little gate to communicate both and keep the dogs on either side as necessary.

These are views of the newly unified road-side plots, as seen from the bottom of the yard, close to the new fence, and looking out towards the road. Both lots are now over half an acre each, 2,300 and 2,400 m2 respectively.

It's complicated to convey even with pictures, and since I am awful with the drawing softwares, can't do that on a map either... But yes, there were three lots fenced as a single property, plus one outside the fence, and now there are two separately fenced lots roughly equal in size, comprising the four plots of land.

Which means, lots more landscaping opportunities opening up. The top soil for the plantation has been delivered, two truckloads that have been dropped in three mounds surrounding the house. Fabiana loves to dig into them and sit on top of the mounds, queen of all she surveys.

Hopefully tomorrow we can start planting, followed by installation of irrigation system for the new areas. Fence, planting and irrigation will total about $5k, hope Barbi doesn't notice...

The great thing about having "the other garden" is the ability to stash our dogs on the other lot and be free to open the gate to unload something, or just to greet visitors without anyone ending all pawprinted or with their butts on the ground from so much canine loving.

A new fence to restructure our plots and possibly the last landscaping push of the year

Sometime this week Omar the "fencer" will be back in order to start on the new task: incorporating the old-new plot into our corner plot, and separating them from the house and the pool. In other words, we will now have two "units" of land, consisting of two parcels each (one built, one unbuilt), separated by a fence (and an internal little gate) and landscaped as two separate properties.

After much investment and effort spent on acquiring adjacent plots of land in addition to the ones the house and the pool sit on, we finally came to realize that the additional land does not quite contribute to making our property more valuable, and that in a functional way, it doesn't really make sense either, as the house is turned away from the road and those two other plots. OK, I like to walk the perimeter, I like the fact that I can throw the ball to Oso and not hit fence or end up at the neighbors, but I feel that maybe there is some sort of self-indulgence in this.

Of course, we always justified it with the notion of our "plan B," that is, setting up some kind of B&B there. But right now we feel that it's more of a plan C, or that we are a bit far from Plan B right now, so we want to have the option of selling either the unbuilt lots, or the house. For the right price, of course. Which probably means we will continue to landscape and improve our place for a few years to come :-)

The separation, besides making the properties more market friendly, have the additional advantage of providing us with a half-acre "dog pen" for when we have company. As it is right now, we basically can't enjoy the garden with company because the dogs get so excited that they jump on everyone non-stop for about 10 minutes, resulting in soiled or even torn clothes, some disgusted friends, and even some friends knocked to the ground by so many loving canines. They do settle down after a few minutes, but the initial onslaught can be quite traumatic for our guests and embarrassing and stressful for us.

Another advantage of separating the house from the other parcels is that I have a new fence along which to do further landscaping! Any excuse is good for spending money at the nursery. But seriously though, I'm undertaking a major landscaping push, as we move to plant all along the new fence, inside and outside, on our neighbors lots. There are a couple of truckloads of topsoil on order already, and the list of shrubs will be prepared this week. Initially we're looking at "lots more of the same," taking into account our experience over the past year with what has and hasn't worked out.

Tamarix, agapanthus, yellow broom, oleanders, melaleuca, photinia, dodonea, purple sugarcane, phormium, and native varieties of trees such as canelon, guava, araza and inga, these are the things that have done well and prospered in the harsh combination of dreadful soils, salt air and punishing winds that define our yard. The jury is still out on the tibouchinas. All 45 of these bushes are currently in a state of grey, shrivelled, apparent death, after the last frost, but everyone tells me they will "come back".

In addition to the current "restructuring," recently we also added a fifth plot, across the street, basically an arbitrage buy because it was offered at half the going rate around here, and the two bids I had made for neighboring plots had been turned down. The new-new one went on sale immediately upon execution of the purchase agreement. If our past experience is any indication, it could be sold by this time next year. From what we've seen, everything eventually sells within a 12 to 18 month period. Again, we're in no rush, and neither are any of the sellers in our area, apparently, so we'll wait it out until we reach our price.

But also, it's good to control a bit more of the neighborhood because we immediately have the land cleaned up, which automatically improves our own surroundings, and by increasing the price we insure that buyers coming in will build relative to the higher cost, rather than the shacks they used to build around here when land was too cheap.