It's been unseasonably warm out here in New Jersey. Sad for the polar bears, but good for me. Steve and I spent the whole weekend outside doing yardwork.
The previous owners had landscapers who did the basics, but that was about it. All the shrubbery is over grown. Leaves are trapped under everything. There's way too much English ivy snaking its way up the pine trees. Two full cords of wood are rotting in the center of the backyard. It all needs to get cleared out.
While there's plenty of land in the front of the house. It's shady and at a corner. We can't do much with it. The prime real estate of the yard – the zone for grilling and chilling — is quite small. Only 12 feet deep. The patio is crumbling. I don't think the previous owners used the backyard at all and, instead created a shade garden for the birds. And the rats who chowed down on all the bird seed. It's hard to drink beer in an alley full of annoying shrubbery and rats.
We pulled out about ten of the shrubs yesterday. More still needs to get chopped.
The good thing about yard work is that killing old shrubbery is cheap. Clippers and a saw. We probably need to rebuild the crumbling patio. That won't be cheap. But we can probably put that off for a year or two. We also need to plant a few new shrubs to help cover up the Taj Mahal that our neighorbors built around their pool, but I haven't decided what will go in and where it will go. I need to cut everything down before I decide what to put in.
I am in the midst of writing a very serious piece right now about neighborhoods, so I'm only going to write silly stuff on Apt. 11D today.
Apt. 11d 
Roger the Shrubber! Among others…
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Can you get any fruit trees or berry plantations going?
Some of my relatives on Capitol Hill in Seattle have a magnificent cherry tree, which my great-aunt has traditionally turned into a freezer’s worth of excellent cherry pies, to be baked when desired.
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I’ve been thinking about hugelkultur in our yard–maybe it would work for you?
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I want one of these eventually for leaf management:
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This is all fine and good but we need to know the important stuff. Like, what are your neighbors like? Have you met the people with the Taj Mahal pool? I have the kind of neighbors that store stuff in their trees so I’m really curious what it’s like to live in a more upscale hood.
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If you got rid of that many bushes, you could get a wood-chipper and make your own mulch. Try not to think of Steve Buscemi when you use it.
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Scantee, no, no, no. At some moment, her neighbors will figure out that she has a blog. They will sort through the posts. And if there is something about the guy next door and tweezing nose hair on the back porch, she is a pariah forever.
Screening bushes which are good include Leyland cypresses.
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I just wrote this about my neighbors,
Seven months ago, we moved to a split level in an upper-middle class, suburban community in New Jersey. My neighbors may share my taste in movies and books. They may vote for the same party. They may read the same newspapers. They may have attended the same college. I have no way of knowing, because I have never spoken to any of them.
Like the respondents in the Georgetown survey, I don’t know the names of anybody of my block. In fact, I rarely see them. They drive by us on their way to work or to their activities. Or they dart out of their homes to pick up the newspaper from the end of the driveway on a Saturday morning, only to disappear for the rest of the day. Our neighbors are known to us only by the nicknames that we’ve given them. There’s “Couple With Two Dogs,” “Man Who Talks Rudely to His Landscaper,” and “Old Korean Woman Who Walks With Her Arms Waving Around.”
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Is it a neighborhood with big lots (1-2 acres)? I’d venture that the sort of people willing to pay that much for empty space value their privacy and physical isolation a lot. (I know multiple examples.)
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No. Little yards. 1/3 of an acre at most.
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I had a neighbor I called (in my head) “Guy who looks like Dave Grohl” but I saw him in a bar last week. I introduced myself so now I know his real name.
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1/3 of an acre is a huge lot in my area, partially because of the topography but probably even more so because the property taxes used to be based on the value of the land only. I know the name and face of at least one person in maybe twenty of the neighbors’ houses. I accidentally swore loudly and publicly at my newest neighbor. I mean, I intentionally told this guy to go f*ck himself, but I didn’t know he was my neighbor. He still hasn’t said hello.
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