Three Little Birds Upon My Barnbeam

This is the third set of baby barn swallows that the pair of birds living in our barn have raised this season. The annual event makes for messy floors but we all enjoy watching the babies grow up and fly off plus barn swallows eat lots of mosquitoes.

Van Gordan Construction has begun work on a project that Bruce is spearheading, they are excavating to begin pouring a concrete wheelchair path. We got involved in this project after a local amateur built some Allan Block retaining walls without having any idea what he was doing. The walls failed, blew out once and were currently sagging horribly.

We just installed this 6' diameter compacted, crushed granite pathway around a fire pit we built in 05'. The pit was originally built to allow our customer to burn large debris. Now since his beloved dog Sammy is buried beneath the ashes this seating ring will make graveside visits easier.

Updating Susie and Jeff's landscaping was a fun process, we worked on two sides of the house but could not help pulling out a couple of over grown shrubs on the other two sides as well. Using Belgard universal block to build walls this past couple of weeks has been the standard as we built both retaining walls and seating walls using this medium in two different locales.

I pulled the Captain off the front deck and incorporated the statue into a bed of houseplants that will go back inside this fall. Lavender rings a specimen scotch pine in one terrace while zebra grass and a gold mop fill out the third. On the north side of the house I used Patriot hosta set in stone for a clean low maintenance landscape.

We've a good start on Jo and Sam's house having all the big plants in and the seating wall built, we are waiting on Terry to finish up the irrigation. The Belgard three piece system made a great wall but the concrete design we followed had lots of sharp curves so it was necessary to cut 90% of the block times five rows, the saw ran non stop for two days. It would be best to design your shape according to the curves the block naturally makes with its various tapered pieces to avoid all that cutting, we did not design the shape of this patio.

This house is on a corner lot of a busy lake neighborhood so the patio was not afforded much privacy as you can see what all the neighbors are doing. Once we installed these five foot viburnums and the Jap maple we effectively created instant privacy. Jo is not sure she likes the look of the viburnum she feels she may prefer a more symmetrical look. A change out may be in order.