tiffin unboxed

Garden Lifecycle - A Fresh Start After Storm Cleanup

It has been quite a while that I've been out of the groove of writing posts. All I can say is that December was an extremely difficult month, and January consisted mostly of the cleanup and aftermath.

There were multiple deaths of a close relative, a lovely neighbor and others. A fair amount of business travel. More family gatherings. Less sleep. And more.

Nasturtiums - one of the many storm casualties

I often tell people I'm a "happy eater", which is just as it sounds. When things go badly I lose interest in food, as crazy as that sounds. So I've cut way back on the fun experiences that normally fill up my time.

In this case, my go to stress reliever of gardening also went bye-bye in December due to thousands of leaves, debris and dried out plants to clean up both outside and even inside the house. They blew in through the tiny gaps under doors and around windows.

My whole yard got completely wiped out in the L.A. area windstorms in late November, and I mean completely in the sense of having a blank slate to begin with in the Spring.

So let me illustrate what 2 months can do.


The California oaks growing all over my neighborhood and in the back slope used to look like this. In fact they grew so tall last year that they began blocking my view completely.

You might have seen on this post about the storm damage how the largest, middle tree toppled and looked like this. Even on it's side, it reached up to the upper level deck.

It took me almost 6 weeks to even accept and process this enough to start calling for quotes to clean it up. The good thing is that although I was expecting sky high prices and lack of availability, some very fair rates came through.


Eventually, the once majestic tree starting getting chopped up. It took less than half a day for it to look like this on the slope.


My desire was to somehow keep that tree around as mulch, but the wood chippers much like the chainsaws, were hard to come by in town after the storm, so they disposed of it for me.


And the view? Well let's say, I can peek in between the smaller trees that still stand and see right through to the Colorado Bridge and Rose Bowl Stadium. Be careful what you wish for, right?