Agaves of Goo and Steel

Not only have we been doing interior work (see previous post)we have had some exterior stuff done as well. It has been a long time since our yard got some TLC and we put in some effort to get things going again.  One of the big reasons for this was the death of many of our plants this winter.  The most disappointing one was the Desert Museum Tree which turned in to a giant twig sticking out of the ground. Our agaves in the front planter literary turned to goo.

Now if you don’t remember about a year ago we got the back yard done. You can see the post about it here.  To contrast it you can see what it looks like now.  The plants have grown in and we had the dead ones replaced.  If you also look at the stairs they now have limestone blocks to make waling up and down the stairs safer. 

 This is the stairs going down to the back yard with the missing tree.

 A closeup of the steel planters with new plants.

Stairs going up to where the Garbage cans were.

What garbage cans you ask?  Heh... Read on...

Sometime last year we got a Nastygram from the HOA that you can see our garbage cans from the street and that they have to be removed if not we would be fined.  Hell hath no fury as an HOA scorned. Since we don’t have a garage and there is no convenient place to put the garage we pulled it to the top of the stairs on the back yard.  It was an eye sore for a year.  We called our handy dandy builder Nelson (who still talks to us after all these years...) and put a new gate on the other side of the yard.  Once that was done Eclipse Landscaping poured a concrete pad for the cans put a plant in front of it.  This was the result:

Remember the white chalk outline of agaves that turned to goo in the front planter? Well Shawn from Eclipse came up with a solution.  These agaves will not turn to goo unless they are hit by a Martian Death Ray.  They are painted steel agaves in the back yard:

Now even with the steel agaves we think the yard needs some more work.  Hopefully there will be a blog post sometime next year referring to this post about all the wonderful additions we did to the back yard.  That is if this post did not cause some kind of paradox in the space time continuum be simply mention the future post.  I guess I better charge the Flux Capacitor to find out…