It is still green here, however the yard is looking very sparse.  That’s because the leaves are off the mulberry in the back yard and also off several of the big oak trees. I have a couple of types of oaks and one type seems to lose all its leaves and the other doesn’t.  This winter I am seeing the houses behind me through my yard, and usually I only see my trees and the tall palmettos.  I have been cutting thru the palmettos some each year, mostly just cleaning out the deadfall, but now I can see thru them a little bit, too, in places.  I like cutting paths thru my palmettos, different paths to walk down.  The woods to the east of me have been looking very sparse and ragged since the hurricanes, so I watered everything real deeply yesterday.  I had a bunch of cut bamboo that had crashed down from where I had it stacked, so I moved it to a new location to act as a sort of screen from the road until the greenery starts growing back from the watering.  

A few palms had died, so I removed – rolled – their dry, dead stalks out to the trash pile.  I swept up bushels of fallen dead oak leaves and put it as mulch around some of the plants.  I changed the angle of the pathway since two main palms were now gone.  It looks really bare inside there now.  In the summertime, before the hurricanes came through, the east lot was in deep shade and from the street you could see nothing in there.  Now it is open to the street somewhat, but it is especially open from like the driveway or from my bedroom sliding glass doorway. .  That’s because the two palms are now gone, and the bamboo has been moved to block the streetside.

I trimmed some giant palmetto fronds from the larger plants in the back on Doug’s land and set them up in the ground standing tall to be a bit of a barrier from the road.  I have a berm around the front of the yard and onto this berm I always pile up the sticks and dirt and dried leaves, to keep the berm high. Then when I trim my turk’s cap or arbicola or crotons, etc, I just stick the cuttings into the berm and give it a good water and hope some take hold.  So I stuck the palm fronds into the berm; by the time they rot and become mulch there, the oaks will have leaves on them and the yard will be under a giant shade canopy again; nice and private.  I also trimmed some of the big ginger stalks and stuck them in the ground also.  Being new moon, they likely won’t grow there, but I needed to cut those stalks anyway as they were encroaching into the walkway where the electric meter checker dude walks.