Backyard After!

Here are the "after" photos of the great backyard clearing of 2018. I'm so thrilled with how it turned out, and appreciate all the hard work that these guys did. We get a lot more light in the yard now, and have more usable space. (The hedges were seriously encroaching into our dining table out there!) They even trimmed and shaped the bushes out in the front of the house. We had one plant/bush out there that had never been shaped before. One of the guys created this beautiful swirly design out of it! It was amazing!!

Wallace and I are both so excited about the backyard and how beautiful it looks. The weather has been really beautiful lately so I know we'll be spending lots of time out there.

Backyard During....

This crew was amazing. Three guys spent almost 5 hours trimming back and shaping the shrubs and trees, clearing out all the dead leaves that have accumulated, weeding and even mowing the lawn! They took off a lot of the height of the shrubs. By my request, they trimmed down the shrubs by half the height! I saw how quickly they grew after the last time we had it done, so had them go lower this year. We still have plenty of privacy, but we finally have our view of downtown SF again!!

Backyard Before Photos

I finally hired a gardening crew to trim (chop!) down our shrubs in the backyard. The last time we had it done was almost two years ago. We've had crazy road construction on our street and block for the last year, which has been loud, dirty and and also took away parking spots. I had to wait until that was done before I could get someone to work on our yard. I've been doing my best to maintain everything over the last couple of years, but, it inevitably gets away from me, and becomes terribly overgrown.

Here are the before pictures of the jungle.

Playing in the Backyard!!

Hurray! It's finally cooling off. It's about 70 degrees and breezy at 7:30pm. MUCH better!!

Wallace and I just came in from playing in the backyard. Here are a few fun videos.

The first one is about 1/2 a session of his "zoomies" (when he gets very excited and runs around in circles in the backyard. Usually, every evening after dinner)



The next two are him catching the frisbee! He's getting consistently better at it!

Tiny project in the backyard

Okay, I realize this is not a big deal at all, but I'm quite pleased with myself. :)

We have a water spigot on our back deck. I had a two-way split on it to allow for a short hose that we use to fill water buckets (which I use routinely to clean up after Wallace) and a drip system on a timer for our citrus tree pots on the deck.

I recently purchased a 50-foot expanding hose by my Mom's recommendation. I have a 100 foot traditional hose connected to a water spigot in the garden level but it is a real pain to reel in after each use. The expandable hose is really convenient, light weight and so much smaller.

I was trying to figure out the best place to put the new hose. I really wanted it up on the deck, but didn't want to take away my other two devices.

Then it occurred to me that 3-way splits are probably made! I looked it up online and actually didn't find any three-way, but did find many 4-way splits.

The 4-way split just came in today, and I just set up my little system. Works like a charm, and I'm really happy with my 50' expandable hose. it's so convenient having easier access to it and it stretches all the way to the back of the yard.

My dog is a leprechaun

Pro Tip: don't let your white dog go out to play in the freshly-mowed grass.

(He looks lightly pleased with himself, doesn't he?)

Plumpacalypse 2017: The Final Tally

(This photo has 130 jars. We had already given away a dozen!)

It was a bumper crop year for us!!

2017 Plum Jam Final Results:

144 jars of jam (12 oz)
10 batches over 10 Days

> 240 cups of fresh plums
80 cups of sugar (40 lbs)
10 4.7 oz jars of pectin

Our last record was 97 jars.
We smashed that record with 144 jars!!

For the record:

Recipe for each batch:

24 cups of fresh plums
Boil down with 3/4 cup of water

Strain

Add 1 tbsp butter to pot of plum juice
Bring strained plum juice to a simmer
Summer for 5 minutes

Add 8 cups of sugar
Bring to a rolling boil, constantly stirring

Add 1 cup pectin (1 4.7oz jar)

Bring to a roiling boil
Boil for 1 minute, constantly stirring

Makes 12-16 12 oz jars of jam

Summer in our backyard

Plumpacalypse 2017!!!

And so it begins....

We just finished making our first batch (12 jars) of Plum Jam!
We were really lucky with the weather/timing. I was afraid that Plumpacalypse 2017 would coincide with our RV Trip. In the past, it seem that I have made jam the last week of June. I think the weather has been cooler over the last couple of weeks, so lucky for us, the plums haven't really start dropping yet. We came home to enough ripe plums in the net to make our first batch today.

Just for the record, i'm putting down our recipe and some step-by-step photos below so I can remember what we did. We just tasted this first batch, and it's relish!!

24 cups of fresh fruit
1 cup of water
cook down the fruit, strain in the new pot using the mesh strainer

Add 1tbsp butter to the fruit juice
Bring the fruit juice to a simmer. Simmer for 5 minutes

Add 8 cups of sugar

stir constantly, bring to a rolling boil

add 1 cup of pectin (add 1/2 cup of sugar).
(This year and last year, I used the 4.7 oz jars of RealFruit Classic Pectin. One jar equals one cup.

stir constantly, bring back to a rolling boil

stir constantly, boil for 1 minute

pour jam into the 8 oz glass pyrex
use pyrex to pour into each individual jar

This batch yielded almost 12 12-oz Jam Jars


Dick, sifting through the plums, picking out the best ones for the jam


24 cups of plums


here's the set up - boiled fruit in right pot, strained fruit juice in center, compost on left


stirring the pot, waiting for it to come to a boil


stirring the hot jam!


the first batch of 12 jars


new labels!

Preview to Plumpocalypse 2017!!

I love when our plum tree blossoms each February. It's so pretty!! I missed seeing it over the last three years.

Looks like we'll have a big crop of plums again coming in June!!

Pretty backyard at sunset

Dick and I finally got some yard work done today. We had so much rain in October that we needed to wait for it to dry out. It looks so much better now.

I took this photo during sunset, which is why it has a pretty pink tint to it.

Happy Grass in the Backyard

This may seem fairly random, but I wanted to blog about my lawn in our backyard. Our lawn was doing okay, but between Summer months, less watering because of the drought, and having a dog run on it everyday, it had taken its toll a bit. It had a lot more yellow in it, and wasn't growing as fast as it usually does during the summer months. I've been wanting to put on our bi-annual sprinkling of "Weed & Feed" on it, but have been holding off because we'd have to keep Wallace off it of for a couple of days.

We also had several patches of dead lawn, due to Wallace doing his business in the backyard. In order to help this, we bought a pack of grass seeds. The day before we left on our trip, I raked up the dead grass, tilled the dirt a bit and sprinkled the seeds on all of the dead patches, and throughout the lawn.

I had a brilliant (my opinion, at least) idea before we left on our road trip to Seattle. The last thing I did before we drove off was apply Weed & Feed to our lawn. I knew this would give our lawn almost two weeks time to repair and regrow.

While we were away, I wondered how our lawn would look upon our return. Would there be a noticeable difference? Would the grass seeds take root?

Behold: we came back to a very healthy and happy lawn! It was very green, the best I've seen it in a long time, and had grown so much that it was in need of a mow. It had grown in thicker and healthier. The seeds also sprouted new grass in the bald patches - not all of them, but a good amount. Happiness!!

We are now taking our watering can out with us whenever Wallace goes out to go potty, and are diluting those patches with water so that it doesn't kill the grass. It's been less than a week since we've mowed the grass, and I can tell it'll need a cut again within the next few days.

Happy Grass!
My parents will be proud. :)

Happiness in my own backyard.

(Back home in San Francisco and found the Best. Stick. Ever. in our own backyard.)

"If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn't there….then I never really lost it to begin with."

–Dorothy Gale, The Wizard of Oz

72 Jars of Plum Jam

2016 Plumpacalypse Total:

Seventy-two 12-oz Jars of Plum Jam

120 cups of raw fruit
40 cups of sugar
61.25 oz of pectin

Five batches made over seven days.

The Backyard "After" Pictures