Upon retirement, the first thing I decided to work
on was
the yard. We don’t have a particularly
big property—it’s only a quarter acre or so—but, because the lot is
pie-shaped,
our backyard has a border of over 300 linear feet.
Over the years, Pat has filled up that border
with lots of hibiscus bushes, vines, various kinds of palms, pineapple
trees, succulents,
a cactus and lots of other vegetation I can’t identify (I don’t think
she can
either).
While I was working, I tended to let all those
plants kind
of grow to their roots’ content, figuring the bigger the better. Turns out, you’re actually supposed to do
some trimming now and then for a variety of reasons, so, now with time
on my
hands, I decided to finally cut the plants down to size.
By the way, I’ve done my own yard maintenance
pretty much
since we’ve been in this house (1994).
Pat once did me a “favor” by hiring some local folks to do
mowing and
stuff. I wound up firing them after a
few weeks when they seemed to run over plants and skip areas that were
too hard
to reach—when they showed up. Besides,
I’ve always considered yard work to be one of those jobs that anyone
can do
without needing to be good at it—kind of like painting and banging in
nails.
One thing you’ll notice if you read through this
retirement
“blog” is that I do a really lousy job of taking before and after
pictures of
my projects—especially the before pictures.
So I have no impressive shots of shaggy, out of control “before”
bushes
and neatly trimmed “after” pictures.
However, I did take a picture of 5 barrels loaded with yard
trash set
out on my curb the first Friday of retirement.
I continued to put out those five barrels, always jam-packed
with cut
branches and the like, for the first five weeks of retirement (I
decided not to
take pictures of the other 4 weeks, so you’ll have to take my word for
that).
As plants started appearing in the back yard over
the years,
the time it took me to do my weed eating increased exponentially. In addition to all the time it took to
trim
all around everything, there was also the damage done to the plants by
lazy and
sloppy weed-trimming (this led Pat to erect various barriers at the
base of the
plants, making the job even tougher).
At some point, I decided that the weed-whacking
would be a
lot easier if I created a big mulched area that included all the
plantings
around the entire perimeter of the backyard.
This type of project fits into one of my philosophies of life
which I
call “proactive laziness.” Essentially,
this means spending a lot of time on a project that makes something
else I’m
too lazy to do much easier.
Of course, what I didn’t realize is that the mulch
requires
continuous maintenance to deal with all the weeds that pop
up—especially when
you use cheap, crappy weed block, which I did.
By the way, I generally spray the weeds with Roundup which, as
an
environmentalist, I know is bad. But, in
Florida, we’re filling wetlands and paving over native areas at a
breakneck
pace. So, as for protecting the
environment, well, that bird has flown—much like the endangered scrub
jays who
used to live in this neighborhood before their habitat was bulldozed.
The other thing I guess I really didn’t consider
about mulch
is that just seems to disappear. I’m not
really sure where the old mulch goes, but it does need to be replaced
every now
and then.
So, after trimming all those bushes and things, I
set out to
replace all the tired old mulch. I guess
“replace” might not be the right word since, although I did rake up
some of the
old mulch and leaves, I mainly just dumped new mulch over the old,
which my “work
ethic” tells me is the superior mulch replacement method.
This turned out to be another 5-week project,
given that I
only picked up and deployed one load a week.
A “load,” by the way, turns out to be the 15 bags I can get in
the
hatchback of my Scion TC. And, once
again, I failed to get any before and after mulch pictures—as engaging
as they
would have been. I did however, get a
shot of my Scion with a full load (again, I chose to only take a
picture of the
first load so you have to trust that four more followed).
By the way, I’m still not sure if installing all
that mulch
years ago actually saved me time in the long run or not.
I’m still crunching the numbers on that one.
With the bushes trimmed and the mulch replaced, I
turned my
yard efforts to the irrigation system.
Our sprinklers have undergone a lot of adversity
over the
years, from being blocked out by newly planted bushes, to being
obliterated by
the pool installation and suffering numerous breaches from two
different fence
installations. In addition, the
irrigation well ran dry once and had to be redrilled.
At some point, the old mechanical controller had
to be
replaced with one of those fancy electronic systems.
I don’t want to say I’ve never taken the time
to master the system, but its current settings are identical to the
ones the
installer put on them and the time it displays is in a constant state
of uncorrected
drift. Oh, and the cycle start time
varies by an hour depending on daylight savings time.
Luckily, the “water police” have never
noticed that system runs twice a week, even when we’re under water
restrictions.
Not wanting to be totally wasteful, I activated
the included
“rain sensor” that is supposed to detect when the ground is already wet
enough
so the current day’s watering can be skipped, thus responsibly
conserving
water. The sensor seems very good at the
latter because, near as I can tell, activating it ensures that the
sprinklers
will never turn on again.
These days, the system is pretty much intact, but
it still
experiences the occasional leaky or clogged head, breached line or
sprayers
blocked by grass or vegetation. By the
way, isn’t it ironic that sprinklers provide water that causes plants
and grass
to flourish and, when they do, they then block the very water that
helped them
grow in the first place??
In any case, I did spend some time evaluating,
repairing
and, where needed, replacing my sprinklers.
I have no pictures of the sprinkler repairs, as compelling as a
before
picture of a head with no water coming out and an after WITH water
coming out
would be.
One thing I realized
was that, every time I worked on the system, I had to figure out where
all the
heads were. Knowing that helps
distinguish between when a sprinkler is buried and non-functional and
when it
actually does not exist in the location where you’re looking for it.
In yet another example of proactive laziness, I
decided to
create a color-coded map of all the sprinklers in the yard so that I
should
never have to figure out where they are located again.
Time will tell if this effort will wind up
being worth it.
So, every weekend (okay, maybe not quite so often in the
winter or when it rained or on weeks I felt I could skip) for more years than I
can remember, I would faithfully execute the mowing and weed whacking. Then there are the seasonal and periodic spreader-centric
tasks like putting down the weed and feed (spring and fall) and bug killer
(whenever I think of it or when I realize a chunk of the lawn is brown from
being eaten by chinch bugs or something).
My general yard maintenance philosophy is that, after I’ve
done these things, the weeds and bugs that survive and the thin and bare spots
that don’t grow grass are just meant to be that way. Doing more would seem to risk upsetting the
balance of the universe. We often get
various solicitations—in person, through the mail or by flyers thrown in the
driveway or stuck in the door—from people wanting to fertilize the grass or put
down pesticide, herbicide or various other chemicals. The ads and flyers are easy enough to ignore
but the folks that show up at my door get a response such as “not interested”
(followed by a quick closing of the door) or a polite explanation that I really
don’t give a crap about the weeds and stuff—obviously the response depends on
my particular mood at the time.
In any case, the only real difference with yard work post-retirement
is that I can get it done any day of the week.
And if it rains, there’s always tomorrow to do it, so maybe there’s less
skipping weeks. And weekends can be
saved for what they are meant to be for: watching sports on TV.
Since we put in the pool over 20 years ago, we’d
always paid
for a pool service to manage the chemicals and keep the pool clean. I always figured, if I did these things
myself, I would screw up the chemical balance so bad that swimmers
would get
all sorts of diseases or have their skin melt off from exposure to too
much
chlorine.
We started having Paradise Pools, who installed
the pool,
maintain it. When they proved very
unreliable, we switched to one of my golf buddies who owned a pool
company. They did a decent job, although
they had some crappy people working for them from time to time also. Then, a few years back, the company got out
of the pool maintenance business and transferred us to another company,
Vero
Pool.
When Vero Pool took over our pool service, their
website
promised they would be doing great things like using GPS data to track
how long
their workers spent on our pool, providing a report of all chemical
balances
and chemicals added every week and allowing me to download invoices and
pay
online.
Sounds great, but they never did any of those
things. There was never a record of
whether anyone
had been to our house or what they did.
Every month I had to send them a paper check in the mail as if
we were
living in the 1990s. Still, the pool
seemed to be getting clean, although Pat said that, when she saw one of
their
workers there, they were only there for 5 minutes or so.
When I retired, I was consequently home a lot more. After a few weeks I realized the Vero Pool
guy wasn’t showing up every week. When I
confronted the guy when he did show up, he denied ever not showing
up—of
course, after that, he never came again and they screwed me out of a
couple
more weeks of service for which I had already paid.
Needless to say, I fired them.
At that point, I decided I had the time to
maintain the pool
myself. As it turns out, pool places
generally offer free pool water testing.
In exchange, they ask you to buy your chemicals from them, even
though
you could likely get them cheaper elsewhere.
I decided to try Aqua Rite Pools, which is the closest place to
our
house and have stuck with them for my pool needs.
Not a lot of exciting stories or any interesting
pictures to
share here but I will say since I’ve started adding my own pool
chemicals,
brushing the walls, etc. no one that I know of has gotten ill from
swimming in
our pool.
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