The Great Wall

In addition to pursuing the usual outdoor adventures this summer, I decided in June that I would like to re-landscape the hill in front of our house. The previous owners (bless their hearts) had taken out all the trees on the hill and replaced them with a hodgepodge of juniper bushes. The bushes would have been nice, except they were too far apart to adequately cover the ground, causing the landscape fabric to deteriorate and weeds and grass to invade. When we bought the house nearly two years ago, the hill had grown quite out of hand. This spring, I decided to get started on renovation.

In the five intervening months I've pulled out an estimated sixty juniper bushes (each at least ten feet across), run about twenty pickup loads to the dump, and successfully used up a good share of my weekend hours hacking away at the prickly branches and rope-like roots of these amazing plants. My method for removal evolved from a rudimentary phase (hacking each branch off individually, then digging out the root system) to slightly more advanced techniques (digging under the root and using a lever to remove the entire bush). Still, each bush took about thirty minutes to an hour, depending on size. At one point I finally caved in and rented an excavator, which compressed about two months of manual labor into two hours....

Continue Reading Add comment October 23rd, 2006