Post Party Planting

After a brief respite after Sergio's celebration we went to work planting.

The first thing we had to do was "paint" the pool shed.  We wanted it to look like the adobe stone.  I assumed this meant going to the paint store and buying said colour.  Roberto said that we could make our own.  Jerry Kolidij and I spent several hours breaking up a couple of adobe bricks into the finest possible powder.   This was then mixed with water and sealant to create a very thin paint.  Jerry was a great help as we attacked the structure first with rollers then with brushes to get the mixture into all the plaster crevices.  It took all day but the result was so much more pleasing than the white block you saw in previous posts.

Jerry continued to be a great help planting a mix of yellow and orange flowering vines along the face of the building and the start of the far stone wall.  It was slow going, especially in the heat.

Sergio had selected a large palm tree to plant off the side of the house.  We wanted to be able to see it inside the length of the house and it works really well.  It now has more plants around the base.  By this stage we'd run out of sod and opted just to put a layer of tezontle in the meantime.

Gabriel has been busy building stone steps to get from one terrace level to the next.  This is slow work as each piece has to be chiseled flat and the progress is pain-staking.  You can also see that the plants along the stone wall now go all the way up to the corner.

Pat and Marco arrived and they helped out as well with more planting.

We've finally been able to enjoy the pool.  Marco was in it constantly and the adults used it to cool off.

There's still lots to do but we're back in the city for a few days and will return on Saturday to pay the guys and enjoy a quiet weekend just the two of us.

Garden Race

We were franticly trying to get the yard ready for Sergio’s party frustrated by all sorts so things - including the fact that the week prior was the big Mexican celebration of Day of the Dead – and nobody wanted to deliver, work, or do anything.  We basically bribed our three workers to come.

Earlier that week we spent two hours at a gigantic – and I mean huge – nursery.  We walked for miles with a very knowledgeable women checking off things from the list prepared by the guy who did the landscaping proposal.

This is what $1,000 dollars worth of plants looks like before they are planted. My only consolation is that in anyplace else, this load of, literally, 128 trees, plants, bushes, would have costs five times as much.

This is me with our first limes – basically everything that fell off the trees as we moved them.

All week long the workmen, including the two of us, have been leveling the lower levels of the lot and placing a layer of tezontle on top of it.  Tezontle is a red volcanic stone that absorbs a ton of water and is especially useful here during the dry season.

Then two trucks arrived with 24 square meters of top soil. It took six of us two hours to move it off the truck and get about half of it dumped in piles around the lot.

Then the sod arrive – 350 sq. meters – this was over 1000 pieces of rolled sod.  There were three of us in the truck and another three up top piling the rolls.

We treated the worked to a taco lunch and multiple beers before they left to join their families for Day of the Dead celebrations.

Here’s out three guys, Roberto, Gabriel and Samuel laying the first sod around the pool.

Unfortunately we were so beat we passed on going into town to enjoy the festivities.