Owen Reynolds Personal blog

Hello and welcome to summer in Montreal, Canada! As the ground is no longer frozen, it’s time to re-start my outdoor yard tasks

This post will cover the work I completed to install a small (ish) Berry White Hydrangea tree in the north-west corner of my yard. This particular corner was in rough shape, having had most of the soil destroyed by weeds as well as some heavy bags of trash I had stored there. There is actually some strategy to placing heavy items on top of a tarp to kill off parts of your lawn you want to replace, below, is the current placement of items I’ve got next to the tree dig site. I want to keep removing dead parts of my lawn

Over the long weekend here in Canada (May 17-21, 2024), I made the decision to use my existing sod cutter to remove all the diseased grass/soil and start over again. I worked about 1-2 hours per day to remove a planting area which was approx 7 x 7 feet square. Most of this was done with the orange sod cutter shown in the above pic, so it was LOTS of work. I do need to do this process again, I’ll rent a gas-powered ground tiller from battlefield to make shorter work of it

Originally, I didn’t have a plan to re-plant anything, I just wanted all the dead soil, rocks, weeds gone 😵. However, once I had completed the excavation, I took a berry white type hydrangea I had bought the previous week, and decided to plant it.

Here are the pix of the process…

Transporting the plant, definitely not the best idea, the plant sat in the front seat with my friend, with the top poking out of my sun roof. I’m sure the wind wasn’t great for the plant. I love Silver bird (my Lexus IS 350 F Sport), but I do need to look into changing to a compact/mid-size SUV with proper cargo space

The tree’s new home in the aforementioned NW corner of my yard

The first few inches of janky soil was easy enough to remove with the sod cutter

Additional layers were not so easy to remove. The dirt was super dry, so using the sod cutter wasn’t as effective. I ended up using a long spade to pull back most of the remaining layers, to then shovel into a wheel barrow

Final excavation around the area where the tree would be planted

Test placement

New soil and bendy board placed around tree

Bendy board fully installed and brown mulch placed around tree

On Monday May 20, 2024, I was running out of light! I had left-over river pebbles from the front walk way re-build last year, so added them around the base of the tree. The arrow indicates nasty grass I had to remove when there was more light

Day time shot after I removed the dead grass on the top edge

I had some left-over bricks , so after work on May 21, 2024, I took some of the spare bricks and placed them around the edges of the work area, to see what they would look like to add a more finished look to the project

Here we’ve got 8 bricks to test out the look

And now with approx 30 bricks after another trip back to my “home away from home” home depot

Here’s a May 22 day time shot I took when I was out with my dog, the bricks are not yet fully levelled or positioned next to the edges, but I’m happy enough with the result for now

May 22, 2024

update for about 8 pm; just before the massive thunderstorm here in Montreal, I leveled out the bricks to square them up against the edges

Update for Aug 8, 2024, berry white has bloomed! Lovely pink and white

Lessons learned:

• Review related online blogs / YouTube videos for items you’ve not done before. In my case, I had never planted a small tree before
• Break the work into small chunks
• Leave lots of time for removal and clean-up
• Use the right tools, start with a sod cutter for the first layer of easy to remove sod/weeds/dirt, switch to a shovel for dry dirt
• Take pix, reflect at various points during the work, to ensure the work is progressing as envisioned
• Solicit opinions from other people, share pix online or send to your friends. In my case, the idea to use left-over river pebbles came towards the end of the work, however, I did double-check with my neighbor if it was a good stylistic choice
• For removal of larger areas of sod/dirt/weeds/land, rent a tool. I will be repeating the same process on a chunk of my yard that is 4x as large, I won’t be using manual tools for the bulk of the work, instead, I will rent a gas powered tiller

Owen in Montreal