FINALLY PRUNED THE BUSHES

The cooler weather lately let me finally prune the completely out of control bushes by the front steps and let us do a bit of porch "Spring cleaning" in the Fall.

We wanted to find a picture or two that showed what they looked like before.  They are the Vitex (Texas Lilac) on each side of the front porch stairs.  They were just always covered with bees and butterflies and looked pretty so we let them grow...perhaps a little too much.

This picture is the same angle/shot as the "after" you'll see below.  It's from the rain a few weekends back.  It's hard to tell but the stairs were completely covered and we started taking the stairs on the end of the porch because it was easier to come up them, ha!

So I got out my favorite cutting implement.  I bought these from a home shopping channel a few years ago and they are amazing.  They have a ratcheting mechanism so if you open them and put them around a branch and close to cut, you can open them, the cutters stay where they were and then you ratchet them tighter and they cut more and more.  They will cut up to a 3" diameter branch.  They made quick work of the cutting and when I was done...

...it looked like this.  Compare it to the "rain picture" above, this is the exact same view after.  We aren't worried about drastic cutting, when the house gets remodeled, they will have to go regardless.  I've done this before and they come back anyway but at least for the Winter and Spring, we'll have the view back.

We don't have a before of this angle but it was a mess of some dead plants in pots from the freeze and some bags of soil.  Got it all organized and cleaned up.  Much better.  It's amazing how less clutter makes things feel much more relaxing and less "busy", ha.

Side note, that large pot had our rosemary in it, but it did not survive the great freeze.  Even rosemary has its limits.  We'll get some of that next Spring.

This spot had the vines of the morning glory all over it.  They were killed with a homemade weed killer (more on that in an upcoming post).  Since they were now dead, I pulled/cut them all off the railing and tossed them onto the ground and then got the mower out to mow over them, scattering them into the wind.  It's now back to an unobstructed view and that definitely makes things more "relaxing" when sitting on the porch.

It's been cleaning time for the last few weekends for sure.  First the outside and now the inside.  Since there isn't much yard work to do right now and it alternates between too wet and too cold, we work where we can.  

More tomorrow...