Our privacy is a key part of our dream yard. We were lucky to find a house that we loved with a property that is manageable for the two of us and will provide us a personal paradise.

One of the things we loved about this house was the private upper yard so that we could spend some time relaxing between landscaping projects. We like our neighbours but it is nice to have the option to not be face to face with them all the time. They also seem to enjoy that we have privacy between our yards.

Last year we were upset to see some of the cedar trees that we cherish due to the privacy it gives us, turning red and losing all its needles. We were sure that we were going to lose a chunk of them, opening our private are and creating a fishbowl of our upper yard, visible to all our neighbours.

After some inspection, we found that Ellie’s perimeter checks included the gravel slope behind the shop. She had slowly been pushing gravel over the irrigation, resulting in our cedars not getting the water that they need to stay thick and healthy.

We ran a bunch of irrigation through the branches with drippers hanging down. The theory being that if the dogs pushed more gravel down before we could build the new wall around the cedars, that the water would still get to where it needed to be. We also started running rocks along the slope to help stabilize and hopefully keep the dogs off the slope.

It has been a year since we tried saving our cedars and it seems to be successful! There is more greenery than dead red branches and they seem to be filling out once again.

In the future we plan to build a higher retaining wall around the cedars in order to create a flat area along the bases of the cedars. That should help ensure healthy water optimization in our cherished cedars. This was an update that I was hoping to be able to give last year when we re-ran all the irrigation.