Labor Day Weekend = plenty of labour

I have been busy. Very. It's now seven-thirty at night and I'm ready to sleep. For twenty-four hours or so...

Spent the past two days clearing, cutting, stomping, pulling and carrying and tearing and mulch-shovelling-and-barrowing. Cleared away a large patch of "brush" in front of the house. That brown garden in the pictures above? It was all a ten-foot-high briar patch on Friday.

When Jose cut down three feet on the side facing the house, he cut into the overgrowth of briar, wild roses and everything-else, and more had died off and was brown... so I jumped in with both wellies. (What's the most important tool when clearing brush? Your wellies, of course!)

Cleared the patch, pulled out a load of Virginia Creeper roots, cut down wild roses. Believe it or not, all of the rose growth came from about five sets of roots. I have given them a good hard pruning and hopefully they will regrow. Buried in the briar, I found about six baby privet bushes--at least I think they are privet--all around the perimeter of what is now the beginning of the front garden. So those have stayed too. I gave them a gentle pruning; they were all a little leggy. I wonder if they were planted and then overwhelmed by the weeds? Or if they magically seeded themselves on the edge of the briar?

Built a small flower bed from some of the spare deck wood/old deck. Filled it with several bags of topsoil and mulch. Planted a couple of plants from my neighbour's garden; her beautiful big plant had sprouted babies. I hope they survive, they went all floppy within half an hour of being dug up, carried across the street and immediately replanted. Also planted a small blue low-growing conifer. There's another, different conifer on the back of the truck but it's going to have to wait until tomorrow because right now, I've run out of gas... the tank is empty.

P.S. The front of the house doesn't need painting. The photos look as if the paint is peeling off the white siding. It's not. It's not painted. It's vinyl siding, and this is the north side of the house... and it needs a good power wash. Soon!