New Life (well, OK... some death too)

Last night I came home from a late night teaching to a great suprise... two new trees in our front yard!



Pomona, the city, has a tree program in which it will plant trees in your parkway for free. Technically we don't own the parkway (you know, the strip of land between the sidewalk and the street) so the city does the tree maintenance and planting there. It was great; we talked to them about a month ago and suddenly, two lovely 6 foot maple sweet gum (edited later: liquidambar rotundiloba to be technical) trees are now planted lovingly in our yard.



Very exciting!

Turns out the last two days have been very planting oriented. As I mentioned, Saturday we did a bit of plant shopping. Nothing big, just a few replacement plants. Sunday we did a bit of yard clean up and popped those little guys into some dirt.



Case in point, a new century plant. We initially purchased the little guy (the the left and behind the stone) and have come to realize that while we love him, he needs years to get large enough to be seen from the street. We got him some company.



A new lime to replace our murdered specimen. Technically this is a limequat... smaller fruits, very limey, very juicy, you can eat the skins. Tasty and pretty.



New lambs ear (I'm trying to get something wooly, yarny, knitty, sheepy into the post!). We bought several of these and they will get very large. Gotta love those fuzzy leaves.

And the death? Well, S has just outdone himself yesterday and today. He built a new wood rack and made a big stack of firewood for us. And where did said firewood come from, well the murderer of course [grin].



Murderer was no small branch, but I should be honest. We had all four of our eucalyptus trees trimmed after the incident and the tree trimmers were so kind as to cut the removed limbs into chunks for us. We now have not one, but two giant stacks of wood.



We think it may take a bit for the wood to dry out for burning, but we are going to have some fires eventually.

And for the sharp eyed ... yep in the first rack are the left overs from our fence building event. We'll be using that for kindling. S purchased a little foot long hacket this weekend and is having great glee is showing me how great it will be for splitting up the ends of the fence panels into splinters. I love the small things in life!

p.s. I got out my thinking cap and my pen and paper and have decided that my walking goal for the rest of the year will be 510 miles. Not bad for a year hmm?