500 Bricks & 600 lbs. of Sand

The garden in the summer when it's hot.

Maybe one clue to "improvements" that are destined for the debris-heap is their lack of being photographed. Take Coat Hanger Valley for example. I have nary a single photo of what it looked like before I started clearing it out. Same with the raised garden in the backyard. Of all the photos I took of this place when we were buying it -- and I sought to catalogue all the splendor of the property -- there is none of this garden area.

Only when Shari sewed a fabric shade for the anti-varmint cage did the diagonally-placed garden merit a digital snap.

This garden was poorly placed for any number of reasons. In winter and much of spring and autumn -- when vegetable gardens grow best here -- it was in shade from the house. Then there was something Ma & Pa Kettle about a caged-in vegetable garden in an otherwise formal-like backyard by the cement pond. Plus, its diagonal orientation took up space and made clutter without offering much in return.

The garden in the winter when it's not.

A clue was dug up during an annual ploughing of the soil (mostly to trim back the pervasive oleander roots). It was an old and hard tree stump, much too stout to have been dug up in prior years, but rotted and frail by the time I found it. Its removal left a huge hole in the soil. There must have been an ornamental tree there when the backyard was bricked in, and I suspect they built the diagonal, cinder-block defined garden to accommodate the tree. Then the tree either passed over to the great forest in the sky, or it was felled as punishment for littering into the swimming pool.

As alluded to in the previous Chicken & Egg Project post, the diagonal garden was slated for demolition and recycling: cinder blocks for terraced, retaining walls; bricks for outside seating and stepping areas; and soil for the new garden (the subject of future posts).

New brickwork nearing completion. Observe the change
in direction, a border between two different sized bricks,
a limitation imposed by the brickwork we inherited.

This past weekend, the site was leveled, its remaining rich soil trodden down (pity, but I can only haul so much dirt) and shaped, and sand and bricks slowly grafted onto the existing brick patio matrix.

Did you know that not all brick pavers have the same dimensions? They look about the same, but when I bought eighty 48¢ Home Depot pavers and placed them to extend existing brick lines, I noticed they are about an eighth of an inch narrower. Over some twenty lines of bricks, that's a huge discrepancy. It turned out that the diagonal garden provided an interruption between the narrower bricks on two sides and the wider bricks on the other two. In all, I salvaged four different types of bricks.

I visited Wilford, a nearby local contractor cum brickyard. The old gentleman at the counter, probably the owner, immediately recognized the sample brick I brought in. "They haven't made those in years." Fortunately, there was a close enough match -- at about 67¢ a piece. I bought 100 bricks.

Looks like it was always this way.

The owner looked through his glass door at my Honda Fit and exclaimed, "You gonna take them in that car?" I did. No problem. Agamemnon Jetson is no ordinary car.

The next morning, I bought another 200 bricks -- using the Explorer. That afternoon, by when I could more easily count the remaining gaps, I bought another 120 bricks, then visited Home Depot for another 60 of the smaller pavers and my 9th through 11th bags of sand. Good thing I used the Explorer again. Smoke Ganesha is no ordinary car.

The site is level, allowing for the imperfections that are a natural part of the beauty of amateur laid brick patios, but there is one great depression, the bricks are too clay-red compared to the aged look of the old bricks, and many make a crunchy noise when you step on them. But the space is open and inviting, and I am tired. However, I have some bricks and sand left over.

Coat Hanger Valley

On the south of our property, in front of the house and across the driveway, there is a gully. It has a creosote bushes, a few saguaros, lots of palo verde and scrawny acacia, and the occasional ornamental which suggests prior attempts to make a garden.

Its east slope was used as a cowboy garbage dump. Broken bottles, pottery, broken bricks and concrete, construction bits and pieces, wire, tin cans, chunks of asphalt, and -- oddly enough -- coat hangers. Cowboys hung up their coats?

Coat Hanger Valley, pretty much cleared out.

There was even a fire-pit which accumulated scores and scores of wine bottle corks. Who would have thought that cowboys drank wine by the fireside? The pit was overgrown with bushes and served as a nest for pack rats.

(I'm a romantic. There used to be a San Simeon Ranch in these parts, so I think of cowboys and bunk-houses. Odds are, the debris around the gully originated with uncouth suburbanites.)

Occasionally in the winter (when it's too cold for snakes) I'd walk down the gully with a bucket and pick up pieces of debris. It's an endless job. Disturbing any dirt yields more artifacts.

A previous owner had dumped gravel and at least one truckload of rocks and small boulders (thank God, of the local Catalina granite variety) at the top of the gully, just south of the driveway. The rocks inartfully cover huge pieces asphalt driveway that had been previously dumped there.

A path traverses the top of the gully, below the driveway.

The gully was an area we avoided because of snakes whose sluffed skins we'd often see there. One time I saw a king snake slither into one of numerous broad crevasses in the rock field, homes for squirrels, chipmunks, rats, rabbits and other food.

But the thing is, the gully is a remarkably introspective opportunity to sit with the Sonoran Desert. I am planning my second park bench to better enjoy the landscape.

One mild evening a day or two after Christmas, I was sitting on my first park bench looking down at the gully when the thought crossed my mind: build a path traversing through the rock field. Which I did the next day.

Harvesting rocks and sifting out gravel. Here's where
I'd like my second park bench.

Turns out the rock pile wasn't as bad as I thought. I used a hand-sized pickaxe to pull out the rocks, always cautious about what might jump out, but I found no evidence of any nest and I'm about two-thirds through. The asphalt chunks weighed heavily in the garbage cans, but the weekly truck had no complaints picking them up.  I sifted dirt to separate the gravel (I don't like crushed gravel -- it's not a part of the Sonoran landscaping palette) which I spread over the side driveway.

Boulders and rocks are being strategically distributed to shore up slopes and more paths. Mounds are built up around acacia and palo verde trunks to be better able to water them. (As a local nursery-man told me, there's not a desert plant that doesn't like water once a week).  I take personal credit for nurturing one large acacia back to leaf, and for the discovery and rehabilitation of a mesquite tree. Its huge trunk and misshapen branches were overgrown with creosote bushes.

I dig up blue and green agaves that have overgrown elsewhere in the yard and plant them on the barren slopes. Irrigation plumbing has been extended. Soon the paths will be extended and I will have fairy lights in the gully.

I have to come up with a better, more accurate name than Coat Hanger Valley.

Chicken & Egg Projects

No, we're not putting in a chicken coop.  Among the many reasons: coyotes, hawks, bobcats and other chicken-thieves (Hungarian literal translation, csirkefogok, a lovely expression which has come to refer to both two- and four-footed scoundrels) are plentiful and we don't need to attract undue attention. This blog title refers to interrelated projects.

Maybe it started when Shari wanted to take out the small, low-raised garden we inherited in the backyard. It's on the north side of the house, so for about half of the year, it's in deep shade. Good for people; not so good for plants. Plus, it adds clutter by the pool and Shari is still dreaming of putting in a pizza oven.

But taking out the garden means finding a place for cinder blocks, bricks, cement rubble and soil. Which brings up the chicken and egg problem. Can't get to one project unless other projects absorb the excess material.

Cinder blocks and rubble make great terraces for a hillside. I'm planting stuff there with the idea of creating additional visual barriers and privacy between us and the three-level house to the west. My track record planting trees and oleander is not great, but hope springs eternal.

I had one line of cinder blocks before. The recycled material forms the lower terrace. Soon I will figure out a way to summon the energy to wheel-barrow more soil, then plant another big tree. Maybe in Spring.

The garden dirt is dark and rich, which is more than can be said about the native desert soil. Plus, if we take out the old raised garden area and make it level, a lot of soil has to be removed. Alas, I cannot use the old raised garden soil because it's destined to be salvaged for the new garden.

The plan is to create a new and better garden on the flat land south of the driveway towards San Simeon. That area in front already has some old cast iron irrigation pipes and sprinklers and loose soil cleared of rocks, so we would not be the first to have a garden there. The priority is to wheel-barrow the garden soil from the backyard to the front.

Trouble is, the low wall curb of the driveway is an effective barrier to a wheel-barrrow. Either I build a funky ramp or I cut out a section to make an entrance for the new garden.

I chose the latter course, and used some of the scavenged bricks to make an inviting entrance. It -- like these other chicken-and-egg projects -- is not finished, but I can get the wheel-barrow through. It's tiring work hauling dirt.

Other scavenged bricks were used to make a platform for my currently favorite outside seating area: a bench overlooking Coat Hanger Valley. That's the gully to the south of the driveway, on the other side from the house, so named because of the coat-hangers, potsherds, broken bottles, wine bungs, wire, and other assorted domestic and construction debris dumped by previous residents. Ah, the cowboy mentality still haunts Arizona.

(More on Coat Hanger Valley in a later post. It's being terraced, planted, path-ed and parked-out to the extent where it will deserve a new name.)

Meanwhile, the old raised garden is still with us as we debate how things should look and be used when it's done, and the new garden is still only a concept as we try to figure out where, how big, and what to use to fence out little scoundrels. As Shari often says and I am learning, the land talks to you.