BurnsFamily Blog

WARNING: This is yet another blog post about our landscaping.
We don’t have many deciduous trees near us in Northern California. When were were building the landscaping plan, we tried to keep “color” in mind throughout the whole year. We were very pleased to see how the Crepe Myrtles changed colors at the first [...]

If you read our post on grilled pizza, you know we like to put fresh chopped basil on our pizzas. The problem has been buying basil that lasts long enough in the fridge to be useful for more than one pizza at a time. When we created the landscaping design, one of the goals [...]

We’ll have to find a picture of what the inside of the pipes looked like. The incoming water supply lines were the original pipes…70 years old. Galvanized steel? Iron? Over time, that type of pipe collects sediment inside that adheres to the inner walls. Over time, the pipe becomes restricted. In our case, there [...]

We are a little late posting these photos, but we couldn’t be happier. Back in rainy January we decided to do a little cleanup in the garage until it was dry enough to work on the yard. For good or bad, the rainy weather didn’t last long and the garage project lingered.
Our plan was a [...]

We consciously picked plants and trees that would were “native” to California climates so that they would thrive with little-to-no fussing. We also picked specimens that would attract birds, bees, and butterflies.

Yum…Nothing better than handmade, grilled pizza.  We make the simplistic “margarita pizza” which is nothing more than fresh mozzerlla cheese, a little bit of sauce, and balsamic-marinated tomatoes. grill for 10 minutes on super-massive-blasting-hot, then sprinkle on fresh chopped basil and kosher salt.

Welcome to our new backyard!
We expect to throw lots of BBQ parties, relax after a hard day’s work, and just general “spending quiet time”. We’ll give you the virtual tour to help explain what you’re seeing.

Welcome to our private garden! That cobalt blue planter you saw from the front porch provides the guest of “hints” of what they can expect to see  in the rest of the garden as you walk through…
It’s a nice, quiet place: the fence panels block the view from the street but because there’s access from [...]

Our goal was to be done by Memorial Day and to throw a celebration BBQ. Secretly we also set that deadline as motivation to make sure we finished and did all the little “clean up” tasks that always seem to linger and never get 100% done.
We’re proud to say that we hit our goal and [...]

We turned the 90+˚ heat wave into pure productivity. We started the day off with 6 cubic yards of bark nuggets (but really, who doesn’t?) then proceeded to lay out the plants in their positions: