Lost an Olive Tree

 We have two olive trees, one North of the raised garden and one South.  Neither has been doing that well.

But the South one is apparently doing much worse.  It had two main branches from the trunk and one of the rotted and fell off just a couple weeks ago.  Then we had the coldest weather ever here in Central Texas,  snow and ice everywhere for days. 

 

 

and the South olive tree is clearly not going to make it.  So I cut it down.

I will need to go out and dig up the stump, but that will require dryer soil, so it can wait.

The North olive tree does not look much better

but we will wait to see what happens in the Spring.

Digging up the back half of the front yard, Part 9

In the front of the ditch, we have a few layers of dirt and rock.

 But with just digging down and moving it out, we can get down to just a layer of rock.

And then we can apply the jack hammer to reduce it to rubble

And clear that off, to get a smaller set of layers of rock

Repeating this process leaves just a small ledge of rock at the bottom.

 

We do the same in the back half of the ditch.  We start with a layer of rock

and after repeated rounds of using the jack hammer and cleaning up the debris, we end up with having moved the ditch closer to the sidewalk, moving rock out and mixing the remaining dirt and dust with leaves and piling it up behind us.

Then we can move on to the next section, digging out the overlaying dirt.

mixing it with leaves, to improve the organic content, and putting it on the pile of dirt behind us.