Trimming around the house

The house had small trees and overgrown rose and berry bushes around it. Oftentimes you see that houses have plantings right next to the walls, but this is a bad idea for many reasons. Firstly, the leaves of plants keep the siding of the house wet for longer after rain. Secondly, root systems can shift and damage the foundation or external pipes (if you have them, there's no pipes here). Thirdly, organic matter retains moisture that will be sucked up by the concrete in your foundation, which will rot the bottom part of your house. Additionally, vegetation can block the ventilation holes in your foundation. 

Being aware of all of this, getting rid of the trees and bushes next to the house was at the top of my list. My house has a stone foundation, but it has later been enveloped in a concrete shell, as was fashionable at one point. Here's some pictures of the process, click on any picture to make it larger.

Trimming in progress

The house, before

The veranda, before

Lupins on the south side, before

North facade with maples, before

South facade, after

Detail, after

I used telescopic loppers for all the branches and a shovel to dig out some bricks and planks. Especially in the corner of the veranda, the rose and berry bushes had gone nuts. I kept cutting branch after branch, but even the soil was completely covered in some kind of travelling roots. It looked like the upside-down in Stranger Things and kind of freaked me out. But I kept cutting, and all the "tendrils" are gone now! Oh, and the lupins I collected into garbage bags, as they are considered an invasive species. They need to still be double-bagged and taken to the waste center to be processed in a way that doesn't spread the seeds.

This process took me two Saturdays. It was pretty heavy work, because tasks tend to line up into chains of work. In this case, I needed to cut the undergrowth in the old vegetable garden, so I'd have somewhere to dump all the waste products. I cleared that with a scythe, as I wanted to first test if traditional tools and methods would be sufficient. And I think a scythe worked just fine, even though I think it works better in better maintained gardens. In this case, a Black-eyed Susan vine had grown all over the clearing and it kept "grabbing" my scythe. The vines were too tough for the scythe and I just pulled tangles of vine with it. And with all of the garden still very overgrown, just moving around takes a lot of energy, too.

Some things I learned in the process:

• Cutting down roses is a pain (literally)
• Old bricks are super heavy
• Digging with a shovel is way heavier than it looks on TV
• Don't wear a fitted t-shirt unless you want to be a walking mosquito buffet

Some tasks still left for the future:

• Digging out the tree stumps around the foundation
• Lowering the ground level, at least in that corner where soil has built up
• Putting down gravel all around the house so the foundation will stay free and dry
• Possibly even putting in a drainage system around the house

In any case, I'm happy with the results! The inside of the cottage is also brighter now, and you can actually see outside from the south-facing windows. My next project is to clean up inside the cottage as best as I can to make it liveable. It would really speed up the progress of these projects if I could stay overnight at the cottage.