Asheville, North Carolina!

Taka and I flew the beginning of April to Asheville. Mom and Frank did too! 

(come back for a nice bit more of the news of the trip!)

I coudn't get a photo of the BEFORE.
This is Mom waving near all of the AFTER!
After Mom, Frank, Taka, and I worked with Laurie and Carl~
TRANSFORMATION!

 
Taka took out those bushes and they ended up, about 7 pieces separated, Taka dug holes for them and between Carl's and the neighbors they were planted.

With the bushes gone, Laurie put in a sweet succulents & rocks spot

How many trips to the Nursery did those guys make? In three days at least two times a day!

And bags of potting soil. Thirty of them?!

 










My brotherrrrr, Carl! All smiles, with debris at street side to be taken away, behind him. Wheelbarrel to wheel uphill his property...

..... to fill his beds with

Taka and Carl put together those two beds.
While everyone was gone on another Nursery trip, the last day, Taka and I got to taking down ivy from four or five trees out back. Beautiful wisteria's growing there too. Hopefully that gets to live (ours was all killed at our house, I'm still so sad about that!)

Speaking of ivy, at the corner of Carl and Laurie's house ivy had been growing up along the drainpipe. Kind of a lot of it. Well, guess what I spent my days working at? I wanted to get to the very end of that ivy's root system. I was up to my arm pit, almost three feet down, and STILL root was going further down. 

After tweaking my knee twice on the slope I was working on, and our trip was going to be over, I got a recipe off the internet for what I call DEV= 1/4 c Dawn dish soap; 2 c Epsom salt + 1 gallon Vinegar (white distilled) mixed together. I chopped off the last of the roots that I could reach and mashed at them to tear them up a bit, then poured the DEV ( NOT that sick roundup sh#*), about half of it to cover what remained of the roots. Some hours later, I saw it had sunk in and I just used the rest of  the weed killer DEV, covering water was left of the roots. And the very last thing I did was throw back in all the soil I'd dug out. If that ivy can live after that...I'm speechless!

Below, Taka taking a break with Brutus.

For the grand finale Taka made TEMPURA but no photos of the feast: (
Just this pic of everyone else relaxing.

Going back to our own homes after leaving our mark at theirs, felt so, so, sooo good!