Aren Cambre's Blog

When we bought our house, we inherited a mess of a back yard. A third of it was overgrown with periwinkle, a fifth had neglected St. Augustine grass, and the rest was just trashy, weedy grass. The flower beds were almost bare and compacted by constant beating of 3 dogs, there are metal parts everywhere (from a nutty guy who lived here for a few decades), the yard was full of trash trees, dirt was piling up against the bricks, and so on.

This Saturday we are correcting the grass problems: we are sodding 3000 sq ft of the former periwinkle and trash grass areas of our back yard.

To prepare, a few weeks ago we killed off the periwinkle with Ortho glyphosate, and this Sunday I shaved the trash grass with my mower’s lowest setting.

There are two variants of St. Augustine grass commonly sold in the Dallas area: Raleigh and Palmetto. Both varieties are resistant to St. Augustine decline virus. The Palmetto variety has several superior characteristics to the Raleigh, one of which is possible enhanced drought tolerance because of an apparently deeper root system. It also has a better appearance and is more cold and damage resistant. Since it’s only 10% more expensive, we chose the Palmetto variety. We are using Miller Grass, a local sod supplier.

Last night we got 320 lbs of topsoil from our local Lowe’s, and today we got another 800 lbs. We are using this to raise a depressed area of the back yard and enhance water flow away from the house.

After you lay the sod, you have to keep it thoroughly wet for at least two weeks. Dallas has an ordinance restricting watering between 10 AM and 6 PM from June 1 through Sept. 30. I filed for a variance from Dallas’s water regulations today; hopefully they will respond quickly!

A June storm forced our hand on our trash trees. We had to remove one large hackberry tree, we chose to remove another hackberry (was choked off with vines), and we elected to remove 9 other small hackberrys before they get out of hand and a Carolina cherry laurel that was growing too close to the house.

We got four estimates before we had the tree work done:

The variance in these prices is astounding. The company we ended up choosing, Sam Hill Tree Care, is properly insured and accredited and came in as almost the lowest price. The most expensive company was neary twice as much! When you’re talking thousands of dollars, that is a huge difference, bordering on exorbitance.

It pays to shop around!

All the trash trees save one are now gone from my property. Below are links to panoramic shots of my trashy back yard, one before and one after the tree removal.

back yard before tree removal

back yard after tree removal

If you look carefully, you may be able to see the remaining tree. It is directly under the TXU power line, so I have to call TXU out to remove it.

The tree removal company’s two trucks were chock full of debris:

Our next task is to sod that yard!

Last year I purchased a Melnor 4200 water sprinkler from Home Depot. It looks like this:

I have read from various places that you should give your lawn at least a full inch of water every time you water it.

What amazed me is that after this Melnor sprinkler ran at full blast for an hour and 10 minutes, it had delivered so little water that I couldn’t see much water some containers I set up around the yard. (This is a common way to determine the output of your sprinkler.) I don’t think this is a problem with the sprinkler per se; I just need to leave the sprinkler running for hours at a time to get the deep water penetration necessary to encourage deep roots.

Update: After 3 hours of watering, the rain cups barely measured 1/2 inch!

This fast action video of me taking down the silver maple trash tree from my front yard is my first video production ever.

The Video

It has rained so much in the past month that we’re enjoying Houston-like conditions: high humidity, highs in the mid- to upper 80s and the lows are around 70, and swarms of bugs and mosquitoes everywhere. This is nuts! Are we really in Dallas? Where’s the 110 degree summers?

Jennifer fertilized the yard this afternoon, and I didn’t bother watering afterward because I’m sure we’ll get rain within the next 24 hours.

My property is filled with crappy trees.

My back and side yards have 9 sugar hackberry trees, two of which are large. Sugar hackberry trees are horrible urban landscape trees. They have brittle wood that breaks in wind and ice storms, their leaves get galls from a parasite, they are frequent hosts to mistletoe, and they just look bad. These trees would be fine on borders of expansive properties, but they are wholly inappropriate for urban lots.

One of our large hackberrys split down the middle during the last storm, so we have to get it removed. Another large hackberry is choked off by vines due to the poor care of the previous homeowners, and it naturally leans as if it is poised to fall on the house. That one needs to go, too. Since we are spending major bucks on those two trees, we might as well get rid of the remaining, smaller hackberrys before they get out of hand. Due to all the electrical wires in the back yard, I have to hire professionals to take care of all these trees.

The previous homeowners planted a silver maple in the front yard near the house. This tree species is about as bad as sugar hackberry trees. They are weak wooded, and their roots are bad on sidewalks and foundations. This tree would have been fine in the back corner of a lot or on an open field, but 8 feet from the front porch is a horrible place. If that’s not bad enough, the tree was placed so that it blocks much of the view from the front door, and it does not shade the house in a meaningful way.

Hackberry and silver maple trees are so crappy that they are among the nine unprotected tree species in the Dallas tree ordinance.

There is an overgrown Carolina laurel cherry shrub in our front landscape. It is about 15-20 feet high. This shrub shades most of the front landscape, making it impossible to grow quality landscape plants. Furthermore, it has a horrible problem pushing up root suckers. No matter how much you pull out these suckers, they come back. You have to rip out whole roots to stop the root suckers.

After the hackberrys, maple, and laurel cherry are gone, I will be left with a mature American Elm, a mediocre redbud (it’s bloom is unimpressive, and it looks trashy the rest of the year), a great juniper (currently being choked out by hackberrys), and a craggy pecan.