Extra space in my yard, what would you do?

When Irma passed through last year we lost quite a few trees, I think 8 in total. We also had a several more cut down this past week that were a little too close to the house. Anyway, the result was that it opened up a huge area for me to do something with…Our house backs up to a creek. The lower you go the wetter the soil is, but the upper portion where you see the banana and the stumps is well drained and remains fairly dry unless we get really torrential rains and the creek comes up, which doesn’t happen all that often.

As bad as it was losing the trees, I did get a lot of firewood and I feel like I have a blank canvas. Obviously, there are roots all over the place, but I was thinking about bringing in some dirt and leveling the area off a bit. Still keeping the slope, but making it plantable, possibly for some more fruit trees…Fence is getting replaced. There will 4ft picket and a gate where you see the posts. So what would you do with this space? Thoughts, suggestions?

I like the expression “god willing, and the creek don’t rise”, never really thought about it actually happening :fearful:

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Blueberries, they like to be near the water, sometimes even IN water. :grinning:

@galinas, great suggestion, I’ve got a bunch of other blueberry bushes, but this could become a real blueberry patch. Would be able to plant out a bunch of native blueberries…

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4 months later…the banana trees just popped right back up…

it’s a bit of a blessing and curse…now I have more yard that needs regular cutting so it doesn’t get overgrown…amazing how quickly nature can reclaim something…

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This is the same banana tree as in the pic from above…it’s incredible the amount of growth it’s put on in less than 3 months…to top it off, it’s started flowering…not sure what variety it is, I think it’s a dwarf of some sort…used to be part of our yard landscape before I removed it…the tree had gotten pretty large and would flower every year, but the bananas never ripened before they got killed by a freeze…We probably have another month and a half of mild temps so I’ll be curious to see what it does this year…stay tuned.


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My company has been on mandatory work from the last 3 weeks and like a lot of people we’ve been spending most of our time at home save necessary trips to the grocery. In addition to having job flexibility, I’m also fortunate to have a great outdoor space. Couldn’t imagine riding out the next month or more in an apartment or tiny house with no yard, I’d go stir crazy. I feel for the folks that have to endure that.

With some extra time on my hands, I decided to do some clean up in creek behind our house.It’s technically a tributary that runs out to the St. Johns and it’s fed by freshwater, but it’s pretty shallow (less that a foot in spots and it gets swampy where the dead vegetation has accumulated over the years…What’s particularly nice is it’s super-shady so even in the hottest part of the day its relatively cool back there…I got the girls some boots and we went to work cleaning out as much muck and debris as we could, even started finding freshwater mussels and friendly raccoon…

Here are some pictures of what it looks like…Probably should have take a before, there was lots of duck weed and other vegetation clogging it up…It’s pretty clear now…I’m spreading the stuff we’ve raked out on the ground…I figure the decaying vegetation should be good fertilizer…If nothing, it will help fill in some of the low spots…

What’s really interesting is some of the stuff we’re pulling up out of the muck/water, including old pottery, medicine bottles from the early 1900’s and other random trash… There was a lot of pine in this area at one time.The wood sitting on top in this pic is pitch pine/fat lighter…you’ll find it sometimes in forest where a pine has fallen and the sap concentrates in part of the log…with this, the tree fell in the water and the lack of oxygen essentially preserved it…these pieces are really heavy for their size. It’s great for starting fires, not that we’ll need it for that any time soon…

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Figured I would post an update. It’s been a couple of years in the making, but I’ve finally reclaimed a good portion of our property that was previously pretty much unusable…

Before…

image

After…

I added a fire pit, an outdoor cooking area and some fruit trees…now we’ve got some extra usable space.

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