Juniper Tams

When we moved into the house last year, there was a section of the front yard that had been entirely taken over by a gigantic swath of juniper tams. These had the benefit of being green and not needing any attention to stay that way, but they're not nearly as attractive as many other plants that do just as well around here and they were eating a lot of space that could be put to better use (for example, for edible things). Plus, this particular plant looms large in my childhood memories as "Evil Ball-Eating Bushes".

When I was about Nimue's age, one of the things my neighborhood friend Janelle and I liked to do was to play with our little rubber bouncy balls out in the driveway. However, there was a large-ish patch of these bushes next to the walkway in their yard, and if one wasn't careful, or or the ball just made a bounce in an unlucky direction, it would land splat in the middle of the bush, never to be seen again. The tams were too dense for even the bounciest of super balls to bounce back out, and too dense to see through, much less reach into to rescue the ball, and were itchy to boot. Sort of like a rash-inducing black hole for one's favorite toys.

Nasty evil ugly things. Needless to say, the extra-large overgrown section of these in our current yard had to go.

When my dad was visiting last fall, he hacked into the morass of tams as a warm-up to the tree trimming project, reducing the volume by about half, and partially unearthing a line of rocks that had clearly once delineated the edge of the bushes before said bushes went feral. This improved things immensely, by we never quite got around to cleaning up the newly cleared area, and it weighed on my conscience.

About a month ago, we transferred my old citrus trees out of their pots into the newly liberated ground, and last weekend I finally got around to pulling out all the weeds, removing another section of tams and trimming the remainder into a smoother shape, excavating old rocks (it felt like I was conducting an archeological dig to discover the old form of that section of yard, as all the old stuff had clearly just been buried),making a new border, ripping out roots of the removed section of bushes (down with the ball-eating bushes: muahahahaha!!!), and planting a cantaloupe plant. Chad and Nimue helped by putting in a new layer of sweet-smelling cedar mulch. A pumpkin plant will go in next month, and if things conform to my vision, the vines of that and the cantaloupe will spread along the edge of the remaining bushes, looking festive and providing gourds.

A slowly-evolving project, but this section of front yard that used to be almost entirely covered with evil ball-eating bushes is finally much improved. I also ripped out the expiring fava bean forest out of the veggie plot in the back and dug in the last 6 months worth of compost, so the tomatoes have a happy home in the ground now too.