1827 Manzanita Ct.

Our Yard, Our History, Our Plan

Okay so this is the page that the whole house section was actually created for. The idea is to share the plans and progress of our landscaping project and a little bit of history of the yard specifically.

The pictures still need gathered and captured to really do this section, but check back shortly and we should have this thing going full swing soon.

The beginning

It is unclear what the yard looked like when the house was first constructed. What can be said for sure is that the original owners spent a lot of time landscaping a very fascinating desert/chapparal-scape. We will hopefully have images of this soon.

The first major Bowser family landscape

Our parents weren’t very fond of the original dry landscape. Perhaps it was because of growing up in the fairly lush forest geography of Pennsylvania, who knows (hopefully we can get them to write or tell us more about what they were thinking).

At any rate they tore out most of the “original” desert-type-scape, and installed a much more traditional American turf lawn with some scatter bushes and red scalloped brick edging. Oh and there was one of those split post style fences.

The yard stayed that way for quite some time.

The renters landscape

I’m not sure what the renters did with the yard, but I believe there was something. I’m just putting in this header in case there is input.

The first zoe period

At first the yard was fairly well maintained when zoe took it over. This probably lasted the first couple of years, but the maintenance was never quite as good or as thorough as was necessary. This would be what you might call the beginning of the end. While the yard was still in reasonable shape it was certainly degrading slowly over the years.

The Tammy and Billy period

All I’m sure of is that Tammy grew a garden in the front yard and that the yard continued to devolve.

The Billy and zoe period

More degradation. The sprinkler system is turned off at some point out futility. Dead, dead, dead. Billy decides to manually till the soil with a shovel. So now the yard has been dug up and probably sprayed with crap, I’m not sure. At any rate, this seemed like the beginning of the super weeds.

The second zoe period

Reassuming responsibility, zoe lets the yard further degrade, until it finally reaches a point of looking like holy living hell. We’ll get more into that at a later date.

At some point zoe tries to salvage what is there by rototilling with the idea of replanting. But for reasons unclear even to himself, that never happened, so there was a dirt yard. Through a very minimal manual picking out weeds and spraying more crap in the hopes of killing things, the yard was now free of most of the super weeds, but was now full of numerous unknown ground cover type things and super grass weed stuff that has been binding the soil together. All of this is slightly less unattractive if cut down, but still just awful. At least the super weeds are gone.

The Tammy and zoe period

So now enter July 2005. Tammy returns “home”. Through various conversations Tammy and zoe discuss some of the haphazard vision zoe has been pondering undertaking around the house over the past year or so. Tammy starts a binder to collect ideas, plant selections, and the plan. Thus the plan is created for…

The Great Landscape of 2005/06

This is where I am probably going to stop for now. There is so much more to cover, and so much rewriting to do on what has been thrown up here so far, I think I will just take a break and go do something else for a while.

At any rate, this is where we are with the most serious intentions, plan, and passion to finally make our home an extraordinary place to live again.