What gardening horrors did you inherit with your house?

When I moved into my house, there were some existing flower beds that had been neglected for several years. All I had was bishop's weed, mint, rose of sharon, morning glory, poison ivy, catalpa seedlings, and sweet autumn clematis covering every inch of the beds. (okay-so I got two nice daylilies, 2 Japanese maples, and a holly bush, so it wasn't all bad). I spent my first year getting of all the invasives.

I also found a cement pad (former driveway) submerged about 4 inches below my lawn right where I wanted to put in a flower bed. Fortunately, my BIL is strong and has a pick up truck. All it took was a little honey talk and an offer to buy this two-headed drill that he was eyeing. He's such a good boy!

Then there was a 1/4 of a pick up load of broken cement pieces that I dug out of my front yard flower beds...

I still have to get rid of the rock "mulch" on the side of my house.

Things were pretty well overgrown. I changed every square inch of soil on my property.
here are some before photos
http://davesgarden.com/journal/d/t/bigcityal/1979/
starting with an empty palette would have been nice, maybe not as rewarding in a sadistic way
Al

When I had this house built in 1986, little did I know that the small sub-division was built on an old sand and gravel yard. The plots were all overgrown with weeds and a few mixed trees on one side of my lot.
I did inherit a nice Bobwhite crab apple but nothing else worth keeping.
I saved most of the mixed trees as a wind break and for privacy.
During construction the city inspector didn't like 2 foundations and they had to come out. They were buried in the back property line. I found them when I was planting a dozen evergreens. Some adjustments had to be made in placement of a few.
Everything was covered with 2 or 3 inches of top soil and seeded for lawn.
Any new garden has to be cleared of rocks, non-biodegradable building debris and broken glass. I spent the first season walking around the yard/lawn picking up broken glass, buckets of it. It kept coming up like weeds.
Everything is fine now as long as I don't dig up the lawn or try to plant new fence posts.
Thank heavens for compost.
Andy P

Al, You have been busy.
Very ambitious and with great results.
Congrats.
Andy P

Thanks Andy,
We had an area that must of been a glass dump also. I still find chunks of it. Sounds like your lot had quite a history.
Al

This thread brings back memories! We built our house on a lot in an area called Graniteville. We didn't get our driveway in for 6 months and it took almost as long to wait until fall to get the grass in. In the mean time, in the dirt (where the lawn should have been) rocks kept coming to the surface after each rain. I kept collecting the rocks (most the liftable kind), put them to one side, and over a whole summer had quite a collection. Over several years, I used them to build some stone walls and to fix some of the field stone walls that were damaged during the construction. I hope to have some time to post some pictures soon. (This is good exercise by the way...) About 10 years after we built the house a section of the lawn died and formed a ring about 4 feet across. Kind of looked like a space ship landed! We dug out the dirt and found where the builder had burned various pieces of wood and debris. Had to dig it all out (decayed wood, etc) and dispose of about a 4ft by 2ft area and replace with good dirt and loam. Not too fun to do but at least it wasn't toxic or dangerous. Our neighbor had the same problem with the buried foundation. There had been a foundation on the property that was buried before they bought the lot. Should be illegal to bury old cement!

I had 2 sink holes form from decaying building material. One was just to the side of an apple tree I had planted. A few times big cracks would open and had to be filled, with spare rocks of coarse. There is still a large hollow there.
Who needs to go the gym when you have a yard and garden to care for?
"Tote that bail, move those rocks."
Andy P

Have you seen my lake?? LOL Funny how no one mentions how much water a yard can hold. After you buy the house, the locals say it "sits wet". Once you get here and get the first rain, crawdads come up out of the ground. I've had six inches of standing water in some places since November. Can you say rice??? ;) I do have to say the yard was lush and green right into fall...

rocks and rocks and more rocks-tis heck on my mantis tines every year!!
Im sure there is more but for me its all these dang ROCKS!!!

I purchased my house and half an acre of land three years ago. My inherited horrors included construction debris from a major house renovation, enormous amounts of English ivy, a bunch of stumps of various sizes, and sticky clay soil. I ripped out almost all the ivy, dug out the small stumps, turned a couple of big stumps into display areas for container plants, and composted like crazy. Sometimes I feel like I put in a lot of backbreaking labor for little visible result, but hopefully that will change soon as I get some flower beds planted.

Oh, and if anyone wants some venison, feel free to come on over and help yourself to the herd of deer that routinely invade my yard! :)

pam

Pam, I'm big on preparation. It saves a lot of work in the long run.
I bet this year will reward you with lush gardens.
Take plenty of pics. Before and after.
Andy P

Actually, my house came with a lot of pluses for gardening. But the previous owner was in love with bushes that have thorns. After spending a couple of years digging thorns out of my hands, DH was very nice to pull out about 20 bushes for me.

We have built 2 homes in our 28 year marriage. The first, a little house, not much money to spare so we planned the yard ourselves and put in all the plants...pretty happy with it. Then we built our present home in 98 and could have the yard done professionally...well, we have ended up moving things, digging up things we hated, trees planted way too close to the house that we had to take out, and wax myrtles blocking the windows and the front door from the road.. Now we are using a bobcat and pull all the plants up in front and on the side of the house near the kitchen. The only things we are keeping are crape myrtles and liriope. I thought the landscape guy would be creative...and I didn't know enough about plants at the time to see how blah the whole thing was. Now I have planned the yard and I will only have myself to blame if I hate it.

Not Martha, I can't beleive you would have lotsa rocks in Mich. As a kid I lived in Eaton Co. on a farm and picking rocks was a yearly ritual.
I inherited D****g Trumpet Vine. Iv'e lived here for thirty plus yrs and still fight it annually .

Wow does this thread bring on very recent memories.... Almost a year ago I posted a series here at DG http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/492301/ seeking advice on how to "start from scratch" on a semi-urban lot which had been completely neglected for decades.

It was, and continues to be, a blast!
I still can't believe what I got done in one year. Also can't believe how much I learned (Thanks many times over to many members of DG!!). http://davesgarden.com/journal/d/m/AnniesWeePlot/

Along with the successes were the mistakes ...lots and lots of those. I still laugh when I think about my first attempt at a "drainage system".

What is most interesting, at least to me, is that I started out with what might be called a rigid plan. "I'm going to do this, then that, then this... bla bla bla." But all those mistakes mentioned above, well, they so softened me around the edges that by the end of the season I had learned that this garden as a living thing, with its own temperment and concept of time. It had beautiful surprises in store for me along with its own blend of stubborness.

It was, and is, a pretty cool evolution.

Annie

The people that owned the house before us must have been told by the realtor that adding lots of plants would help sell their house. So they did. They bought lots of "stuff" and stuck it . . . wherever. I have been rearranging and tossing plants for two years.

Then we found out, our house was built on an old river bed, so you dig down 2-3 inches and you find solid sand and rocks. Makes it a bugger to keep things fertilized, standing upright and watered.

In the front of our modest cottage were two of those hideous contorted junipers, planted side-by-side right up against the house, leaning outwards -- fiendish green alien vegetables ready to attack to grab unwary visitors and devour them whole. The rusting iron railing and uneven concrete stairs just added to the whole welcoming appearance....NOT!

I don't know what you guys in other regions do with such big properties, I have all I can manage with a 5600 sq. ft. urban lot, lol (although I do work full time, as does my DH). The previous owners, two elderly sisters had gotten too infirm to garden. It's not unusual in our neighborhood for folks to fence off fully half the backyard so that they don't have to garden the whole thing, and that's what yet another previous owner had done -- built a brick wall to terrace half the backyard (it slopes downwards pretty steeply), with a concrete patio and great big storage shed.

That was lovely, but what wasn't so lovely was that the last half of the backyard, a good-sized (at least by urban CA standards) piece of land about 45' square, was given up completely to weeds. It looked like a jungle, complete with 3' long roof rats! If you stood there and looked in, you could not see the back fence AT ALL! The weeds were as tall as I was, and between the ivy and overgrowth it was a total mess.

We did the landscaping in phases, because it was such a huge job. Took my husband hours and hours to dig out those horrible junipers. Took an entire summer to kill off the Bermudagrass lawn, which fortunately was just in the front. Not so fortunately, it had jumped into the neighbor's yard and to this day keeps trying to invade back in under the fence line!

The backyard took almost two years to complete. My husband had been doing the hardscape for me and right after we finished the first of the backyard projects, he suffered a mild stroke. He recovered very well, but no more heavy lifting for him, I decided. We eventually hired our gardener to finish that last weed-filled section.

Sorry, I meant to add a photo to the above posting so you could see the contrast, although the "before" photo looks positively lovely compared to the weed- and ivy-infested mess it was for decades before we finally tamed it! The soil here is awful -- gluey, suffocating adobe clay -- and a walnut tree dropping juglone-tainted leaves every year doesn't help much. But we added compost on top, and so far the plants we added are managing to survive.

I inherited...a mess. 2.5 acres covered with salt cedars, siberian elm, a couple of huge pits which god-only-knows how they got there, nasty weedy patches of bermuda grass...oh, and of course mesquite and sagebrush.

Salt cedars are gone courtesy of a backhoe, pits are slowly being filled in, bermuda grass is at least diminished, still trying to convince DH that the elms need to GO. Mesquites are trimmed up and now resemble trees more than large knotty messes and some areas are beginning to look less scary but I figure I have years of work to go. I got lucky and lightening struck one of the elms so one down...now if I just knew some way to kill the rest of them and not have DH catch on....probably just have to pray for lightening.

Hmm, DanaDW, maybe a few discreet metal rods wired to the elm branches might help, LOL!!

Tempting. You have no idea how tempting, I HATE those trees. They are getting ready to drop seed in the next month and I'll be pulling out seedlings for the next 4 months :(.

Well, I did the research and I knew ahead of time, but we bought the place anyway. We have sand, sand, some caliche, some more sand, gusty winds, did I mention sand at least 5 ft down and alkalai water and some more sand? Have my own little dunes for riding in. ...Some sort of thorny brush that is the first colonizor of disturbed sand. We punched through the caliche for the trees and made extra big planting holes for them and amended with topsoil...well, I guess I can't complain. Something to do with living in the desert in a basin that was once part of a huge lake many milenia ago. The cotton tails and jackrabbits are also part of the deal, I guess. On the other hand, I have a lot of (sandy) space to put (lots) of raised beds. And my DH is really good at building fences to fence dogs in, rabbits out, etc. ...and I dream of a small English Cottage Garden oasis? I always liked a good challenge.

Have you seen this nursery kmom? http://www.greatbasinnatives.com/ I haven't ordered from them yet but plan to soon, lots of stuff no one else carries.

What a good thread you started here Katie! Our gardening horror isn't specifically limited to our house which we love, but the area, and it's an alright trade-off considering the awesome weather but we inherited a clay yard with lots of small limestone rocks in it. The augustine sod job the builder did was sub-par to say the least, the sod didn't look day-old, it looked week-old (lol) and it wasn't butted up piece to piece so there were uneven gaps and dips left in the yard. After "harvesting" rocks for about 3 months and pulling out weeds the past year, covering the lacking sod with a mix of 3 grasses, fertilizer and about 6 cubic yards of manure/composted dirt (not counting the dirt we had to buy to make raised vegetable garden beds) I can finally say it is looking better!!!! I haven't seemed to have problems getting things to grow in the clay soil, it is just hard to dig in to get the plants/trees there. =) So I have to be extra careful about what I'm going to put in because it takes double the sweat equity.

Our house came with a rather large level back yard. I couldn't understand why the previous owners hadn't done anything with it, until I try to plant things. Under about 2" of silty soil was solid bedrock. Last fall after 7 dumptruck loads of top soil,( Carried 5 gallon bucket by 5 gallon bucket) and several rounds of rock we had half of a beautiful garden last spring.
Have been working on the first of several more trucks loads of topsoil this week. Oh did I mention the 30year old Cross tie retaining walls that have to be replaced? One day We will have the nicest gardens in the neighborhood, I just know it if doesn't kill me first!!!!

Everything I inherited came from 10,000 years of glacial dump. The most bizarre thing is an exposed small rock that is warm. It is actually a very large glacial dump rock. Any snow that falls on it was melted and it grew moss where nothing else did.
Maybe a hot spring under or is it the gateway to a lower more scary place. LOL I built a raised bed over it.

DanaDW, cool site; thanks. I'm recently moved from the San Joaquin Valley in Ca, Bread Basket To The World. Previously I gardened on "an old cow pasture in GA." Both places with long growing seasons and actual soil. I'm trying to learn as fast and furiously as the wind blows around here! Ah, but I love having space and a few acres. It would have cost $5,000,000 to have this much land this close to a city big enough to find a job in in CA. So, I'll take the sand and the wind and we'll see if I can't just convince Mother Nature that an English Cottage Garden shouldn't bloom in the middle of the Great Basin :-)

I definitely agree this beats living on a postage stamp lot in S. Ca, been there and done that, bleah. Can't handle life in a hamster cage.

Besides which have you noticed our evenings and sunsets? Tuscany has nothing on us there.

The main landscape problem I inherited with my 1920's bungalow was tree trouble -- the wrong trees and trees in the wrong places!

7 mature silver maples (trash trees IMHO) -- 5 of which we have removed. Of the two remaining, one looses big chunks during storms and needs to be cut down for safety.

Someone had also planted 5 conifers -- 3 white pines, a blue spruce, and a juniper in a space that is barely big enough for 2 mature trees. Sadly, the blue spruce was so crowded against one of the pines that its shape was permanently marred, so it had to go. We removed all but 2 pines which are nice but unfortunate in their placement. I wish they were at the edge of my yard instead of right up against the house.

I really wish people would think before chosing and planting trees!

Sedonia

Under a Norway Spruce, buried, is a cement swimming pool. It was built for grand kids many years ago, so I understand. Do I dig it out for the summer?:) I think it is only about 1.5' deep.

I'm usually at work well before the sunrise, but because our office is moving this weekend, I spent several days driving right at sunrise so that I could be in the office when all the normal people are. The sun rises from behind me as I drive, and turns the hills and dried sage brush into red, purple, mauve and gold. I've tried taking some photos, but the colors just seem drab and dull in pixels. ... In fact, it was an early morning sunrise last summer as we came over "the hill" from CA to visit that finally sold moving to NV for me - awsome. I'll deal with the sand. We have a good well. Daylilies are indestructible. Drip irrigation going in this spring. Look out, Mother Nature -- Cottage garden, here I come!

SSipes, I was barely able to avert having DH turn all our trees into the kind of problems you are experiencing. Last fall we bought some black austrian pines (3' tall) and 3 liquid ambar sweet gums (5' tall). They are pretty scrawny right now, but they each have in them the potential to grow BIG. The liquid ambars are planted about 10' too close together, so I am fearing that in 5 or 10 years or so, the middle one will have to be cut down to give the other two space to spread. I got to the pine tree spacings before DH got to the hole-digging auger, so those are planted further apart - but still, at the very bare minimum recomened distance. We have more trees planned for this spring - I've been working on DH all winter about how trees need SPACE even if they are tiny and lost looking at the time of planting - but DH has a pretty thick skull (he's stayed married to ME for nearly 20 years, so it's gotta be pretty darn thick!). Since I can now use the tractor in general, maybe it is time for me to learn how to use the auger...

Cement swimming pool under the spruce. Wow, not your usual kind of problem. Wish I had some advise to give about it. Good luck!

Take care, all.