It may have occurred to my devoted blog audience, all two of you, to wonder what has become of the condo that I used to own after I bought my fixer-upper house back in September. The answer is that I still have the condo too. I am intending to paint the place, restore or replace the carpets and then rent it out. For the past four months however it’s just been sitting there while I spent every available weekend working on my barn project. And I mean, it’s really just been sitting there. To the point that the patio wall and part of the upstairs neighbor’s balcony were being taken over by my untrimmed trumpet vines (sorry guys). I think they were trumpet vines. They were there when I moved in, and they only ever had a handful of white flowers so it’s hard to be sure that’s what they were.
Today I trimmed them. Down to the ground. Gone. I also removed a night-blooming Jasmine [not a real Jasmine] plant which was mostly killed by the freeze back in December. I could have just trimmed them back to a manageable size I suppose, but it’s doubtful that a renter will want to maintain my plants and the landscape company has refused to ever trim so much as a single leaf off of them. I chose to get rid of them and now they’re gone. The place looks really barren now.
Sorry I don’t have a “before” picture to share as well. The dead leaves on the ground are mostly from the Jasmine, but the lawn has quite a few tree leaves on it right now as well so I don’t feel too bad about the mess. The mow ‘n’ blow crew should clean them up when they come later this week.
I left the tree fern for now. It’s really healthy and I didn’t have the heart to kill it. It’s not much work to maintain and it’s large enough that its roots get plenty of water from the regular landscape sprinklers so it’s pretty self-sufficient. I also have a little Zinfandel vine which I didn’t remove even though I probably ought to. I planted it as a novelty, but it’s the real deal and will require yearly pruning to keep it from taking over. They don’t transplant well. I suppose I could try to dig it up and cart it over to my new house, but it would likely be easier to just order a couple of new vines from the same nursery which got this one for me.
