getting things done: day 2

I spent a lot of time outside today, and have a packed-to-the-brim green bin out by the curb to prove it.


First off, welcoming the Food Forward volunteer to my backyard to harvest all my ripe citrus. He tackled the giant orange tree, pulling down 2.5 boxes (or what he estimated to be 100 pounds) of oranges.

While he was climbing up in and around my orange tree, I spent 2.5 hours picking the evil kumquats. Most of them -- except for those at the very tip top of the tree -- are now gone, off to a food pantry that will use them wisely. Yet they're so small, they didn't even fill one fruit box, which was kind of disappointing. The last four summers have made it seem like I could've filled 20 boxes with all the kumquats that fall off that tree.

Here's the less-orange "after" shot of the tree, also now missing a lot of dead branches that were on it. While I was climbing up in it, I realized I haven't even thought about trimming that tree once since I moved in. It really needed it.

Once the harvesting was done, I took a lunch break while waiting for the sun to move to the other side of the house / the backyard to get shady. Then I finished item #1 on the to-do list and started #3:

1) Finish weeding, cleaning and mulching final two gardens

-- DONE! And I have one bag of mulch left to throw into the rose garden once the gardeners use the leaf blowers a few weeks in a  row and half of that mulch is blown into the yard.

3) Clean up back corner and side of house near the shed

-- Half done. I raked up the thousands and thousands of leaves that have fallen off my neighbor's tree into my yard, cut off the branches of said tree that are hanging over the wall in my yard and left them in piles to go into the green bin tomorrow after it gets emptied. Tomorrow, I need to migrate the brick pile to the side of the house out of the path of falling leaves, spray Round Up to kill the grass and weeds growing crazy back there, put weed blocker cloth down as a back-up to the Round Up, and arrange stepping stones to the shed and paved side of the house. Once that's done, I'm pulling the patio furniture out of the shed / its winter home, and putting up the umbrellas so I can enjoy all my hard yard work :)