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 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.

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:

This weekend we completed the landscaping project’s last major construction phase: enclosing the “garden” area next the house, just off the dining room. It looks great! And it feels like we’ve added a new living space to our house. We used to call this our “rose garden” because there were so many roses [...]

When is a chop saw, a laser level, and lumber considered part of landscaping? I don’t know either, but that’s what we’re working on for this phase of the landscaping project.
Here’s a sneak peek at the next stage of landscaping.
Can you figure out what we’re building? More pix tomorrow…

When we removed all the scrub trees and overgrown landscaping a few years ago our pair of morning doves looked downright depressed and confused. Nowhere to land or explore. And the blue jays that used to “squawk” us awake every morning would fly in occasionally, but wouldn’t hang around for long.