2025 Wrapup

A big focus for us since midsummer was building out our side yard, which began as a scraggly patch of weeds that flooded with every heavy rain.

We’d already done some planting with our first grant to help with the flooding, but the tornado changed that shaded corner to one that gets the full brunt of harsh summer sun. That gave us two goals with this project.

The flooding we get is entirely due to street runoff, and we’ve previously shared the swale we built in front to slow and collect some of that. The next stage was to build a dry creek bed to redirect what pours in across our neighbor’s yard.

We’ve only had a few heavy rain events since finishing this, but so far it’s working exactly as intended. For now, we let the redirected water spread across the back slope, but we have future plans for that as well.

For shade, we built a slatted screen to double the height of the fence corner against the afternoon sun. It’s not quite tall enough for full shade, but it does help, and it doubles as a privacy screen. We’ll build one more of these panels between us and the house next door and let our growing trees fill in the rest.

A last touch to finish out that space was to build a flagstone path that also serves to partition off the planted areas. Further down, this will cross the creek bed and work its way down to our blackberry patch.

We’ve added even more native plants since these photos, though it’s all very brown and wintery out there now, so we’re excited to see how it fills out next summer.

We’d love to replace all our grass with dimensional planting like this, but it’s a slow process, given how large the backyard is. The deck we’ve designed will help break that up, and meanwhile we’re slowly adding trees and bushes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we’ve learned a lot from the Japanese, who were, after all, already experts at this a thousand years ago.

Everything Else

Excitingly, we managed to get our fireplace up and running ahead of the cold —though our dreams of cozy December fires didn’t quite pan out with the unusually warm weather. January awaits, though, and the persimmon seed forecast has promised a snowy winter.

We made use of this week’s warm weather to begin painting the back of the house, before running out of paint. It’s so nice to glimpse the finish line on that project, albeit distantly and with heavy use of a 20ft ladder.

Otherwise, we’ve been prepping to paint the newly finished laundry room, sanding trim until I broke the sander, sealing up our crawlspace, and starting to get quotes for work on next projects.

Our trail cam had been very active lately, with almost nightly coyote visits, until a huge dead tree nearly smashed it a few mornings ago and blocked the game trail. We were hoping for an epic photo of the crash at least, but instead got only a squirrel musing on the aftermath.

Merry Christmas, friends!