It's mostly a clean slate up at the new house site at Struan Farm, something that has its own set of issues when trying to decide how to landscape. Yep, it's the "vision thing," to quote former U.S. President George H.W. Bush. (I remembered this was a somewhat infamous Bush phrase, just couldn't remember which one so had to look it up....)
So I've started at the beginning, the entrance. Over the holidays I got stuck into extreme weeding, cleaning up the front roadside and the bank under the redwood grove:

I forgot to take a "before" photo, but that's just as well, it was a complete weed fest!
Right now we're thinking we'll make a shelf in the front for a large limestone rock (or rocks), then plant shrubs or a conifer or two around it. Once the weather is better for planting (autumn), we'll pop in azaleas, rhodos, hostas and hellebores under the redwoods to make this a nice woodsy garden, probably some spring bulbs as well. We will also plant a few additional redwoods, extending the grove up into the paddocks a wee bit to where we'll put the entrance gate.

Since John wants to mow the orchard area, my next project was to pick up fallen branches before he could do so without completely trashing the mower. We had taken out several large trees to make way for power lines, and a lot of the debris was still on the ground.
No longer! I didn't count, but there were at least six trailer loads of stuff that went to the burn pile.

Next comes the digger to cut a straight edge along this bank, after which a retaining wall will be built running up the drive. Soil will be dumped to back fill the area, making it flatter so John (or Karen) can mow this safely. (You'll see a line of grass in the foreground of the photo above that John wasn't able to mow because of the hill that's there right now.) We'll plant a (fast growing?) hedge from the gate up the drive to camoflage the retaining wall entirely.
Are you counting the projects here? Lots on!
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