Day 2: Fruit, Glorious Fruit!

Gene and I arrived at the house today with many supplies in hand and plans to test out paint colors and work on the landscaping which has become way overgrown. The backyard has a big sloping hill for all the trees and landscaping and it looked like this when we first saw it:

All of the rain that California has been getting has made the growth a nightmare. We donned our gardening gloves and grabbed clippers and a saw and started on it. Gene attacked what we have called the banana tree (as we have no idea what it is) and went to work on taking out all the bottom branches.

Here's pictures of before and after:

Oh, look, there's a wheelbarrow under there. That will come in handy for us to hall away all these branches and leaves. We also discovered that there was a milky sap coming out from the branches when Gene cut them off--this led us to a quick Google search to discover that these are in fact two rubber trees! Now Gene and I just need to figure out how to process rubber. Actually, my plan is to find a hammock to string between the two rubber trees. It seems like the perfect place to read and sip lemonade.

Speaking of lemonade, behind the two rubber trees we discovered two fruit trees. You'd think we'd have seen these before, but had such a difficult time to get back to this side of the yard. We have one lemon tree with some small fruit on it already. The blossoms smell wonderful. The other plant we think is a grapefruit, but we'll have to see. I'm betting on either that or an orange of some kind. I also think that we might have some avocado trees as there's some small green fruit and I picked one up to open it and it had a pit and was green inside. Gene's not convinced yet that they're avocados, but time will tell.

Here's the trimming that we've done so far. There's still more work to be done, but we can see tree trunks now and individual plants. More about painting and paint choices tomorrow!