My assistant worked all weekend before Christmas and got all the remaining cardboard installed with jute staked over it. As you can see, I will have to get some more to finish the job. We have some loose cardboard up by the barn and will use that down here, but I will need to buy some more rolls as well.

Once the cardboard is complete, I will be moving many of my roses up from my current garden and buying and planting many more. I would also like to get the arbor put up for the climbers.

Here is a view of the sycamores by the pond. You can’t see them because they are leafless this time of year, but you can see their supporting stakes.

It was a beautiful, sunny day—but very cold. It is much colder here than where we live now, and also rains more. It will take a while to get used to the new climate, but I am sure that soon it will just seem normal.

Redwoods out of the fog . . . Here are the redwoods we planted on the slope behind the house. I should probably go up there and check on them, but they seem to be doing ok so far.

The solstice is the low point of the year for plants. There is a real pause in nature now. Because we are in a climate which doesn’t get snow, this is our dead of winter. In a few weeks—even as few as three—plants will start going crazy with life. Even plants which don’t come out of dormancy until later in the season will seem to vibrate with suppressed energy. It took becoming a gardener to make me like January and February, but now I find them incredibly exciting.

Alleé in the sunset . . . Here is my row of sycamore trees along the pond. They are going to look so cool in a couple of years. We planted them quite close together (I hope not too close) so they will create a line of shade.

We will probably pollard these trees—which means once they get to the size we want, every fall we will trim the branches back to that specific length. Each spring, many little branches will grow out of the cut branch and after a few years, the branches grow a kind of knot where they have been trimmed. This technique is used to keep trees to a certain size, especially in confined spaces. You see it is used on a lot of street trees in San Francisco. We will use it here to create a very disciplined look near the wilderness of the pond.

I bought some roles of jute to stake down on top of the cardboard, since our technique seemed to work. The jute is wicked expensive though, so it will be very costly to do this. I comfort myself with the thought that the jute will last for a long time—several years at least. Hopefully, by the time it has decayed away, we will have the area tamed enough not to need it any more.

Once we have all the cardboard and jute out and staked, we will cover it with straw for mulch.

. . . and our cardboard was still there!

I feel like the guy who wrote the “Star Spangled Banner,” because after heavy winds, my cardboard was still there. My assistant wouldn’t even look to see if it was still there. He is still upset about his previous efforts blowing up.

Getting the cardboard put down is very important because I want to move my roses before they come out of dormancy and need to have the whole plowed area covered with cardboard before I do that.

The jute cover seemed to work, but jute is fairly pricey, and plus, we will have to cut it to plant through it, whereas with the cardboard, you can just chop through it with the shovel. I will probably wait one more big wind just to make sure . . .

We laid a test strip of double cardboard and jute over it. Hopefully, we will have some high winds soon to see if it stays stuck.

As you can see, the blue tarp blew off the dirt pile. If you had seen it billowing wildly in the wind, you would wonder why it hadn’t blown away altogether!

The cows from the dairy at the top of the hill were out grazing today. In this small photo, they look like little specks near the top of the hill. When the wind is right, we get a big whiff of cow, but then the whole area gets that from time to time.

Our across-the-street neighbors finally had to fence their yard, because the cows sometimes escape their fence and wander into the neighbors’ yard. They said it wasn’t the cows so much as the cow-pie surprise, which got really old.