The back yard

Leslie and I have both turned our attention to the back yard. Leslie has been clearing and planting. She put in two lipstick palms (no Sarah Palin reference intended), two bottle palms and two alexander palms. She also put in two banana trees and a couple of plumerias.

While she does this work, I am making a fence to screen out our next-door neighbor's house. He is a HVAC guy (Mel the HVAC guy) and uses his backyard as a corp yard. He is a nice guy but we just don't care for the view.

When we arrived, the back corner of the house looked like this:
We didn't like the tree as it is a fast-growing and destructive tree. It was quickly heading into our electrical wires so the electrical company, Helco, removed it for free. (I figure whoever named the company had a sense of humor. The very high electrical rates make the name honest.) Impressively, we fit the whole tree into the car to take it to the dump.

Anyway, the back corner now looks like this


The two palms on the right are the bottle palms - they will grow to be about 15 feet with - yes - bottle shaped trucks. The lipstick palm to the left of the power pole will grow to be about 20-25 feet with a cool red trunk. I think my fence screen looks pretty good if I do say so myself.