Haul it away. No unless you have money to burn. BTW, you could burn some of the bigger twigs to make them take up less space, but wood ash is very alkaline so don't heap it all in one place and expect things to grow there. 2. Pay someone to grind it . . . hmm. It seems like what you have is not enough to make that a cost-effective option but you might investigate. I just saw an ad in my local paper for someone who offers tree trimming and shredding but you don't know if that is just more of the same level as what you have, so investigate. I get very woody debris from the power companies out at the Arb. and we are always picking out sticks from it, but we just throw them into the woods for the most part. Finding someone with a good mulcher might be difficult but you never know. I am toying with buying a small electric one just for twigs around my yard, but have heard they don't last long. 2, OK to leave as is for a year? I would think so. As far as needing more mulch, you can figure that out in a year, see what you've got. If it looks shabby you can pick out the big stuff and then freshen it up with a top dressing of fancier mulch if you like. Stuff that isn't breaking down, the big pieces, aren't robbing the soil of nitrogen. I don't know about the smaller stuff, it depends. If in doubt, test the soil before you plant the grass. I think you're supposed to test the soil anyway. Some people get a load of topsoil to rake around before they seed a lawn, depending on how good or bad the soil is. Seems like your money would be best spent on something like that rather than futzing with your mulch. But test first. I don't think you're ruining your soil leaving mulch on it for a month or so. But if it were me, I'd read up on seeding a lawn and check off all my boxes for that. If you want a lawn, focus on doing the lawn. I think you are wise to just rake the stuff into the area you want to have for shrubs and leaving it. It will be fine in a year and then you can decide what to do with that area and what's left. I find it best to break up a big re-landscaping project into sections and focus on getting one part done at a time. Take some time out to enjoy your yard too!

Sorry about the confusion. The "+" sign is a symbol representing the center of a plant. The circle represents its perimeter. In this case, it represents a small tree. The "." symbol is the same thing. In this case it represents a shrub form. The shapes in between the patio and house are generic plants ... there only to give the plan a vague sense that plants in that space are possible. When looking down from above (as in a PLAN) all individual plants are going to look like a circle with a center. The scalloped edge thing is a plant MASS .... where smaller plants are amassed together such that you do not see the individual, but only the perimeter of the group. Here, it's all generic and doesn't yet matter about the plants. I'm only showing them to say that "some plants can fit in this space." At this point, all you need to care about is the patio. The hardscape (patio) comes first. The plantings are subordinate and will comply with whatever way the patio ends up being. Since you don't want a deck, whatever steps you have will come fairly near the door. You'll still need a landing at the door (rather than immediately stepping down as that would be cheap looking and feeling, such as what one would expect to see in a mobile home situation) which is why I suggest make it and steps full width of the wall face. It will work and look much better than if you try to make it only one door width, as it is now. You only need 4 risers for the set of steps. You want a small patio. There is no need or reason to make a contrived or convoluted set of steps with this small, simple need. Keep them spacious and simple and you will have a nice finished package. Get cute or clever and you might like it for a while, but others will wonder why you bothered or the next owner may dislike it. Simple, well functioning steps will work best. You can glamourize them in the construction details, if that suits your taste. If you want something other than straightforward, it would be best if you sketch it out in plan view, and then I'd be happy to react to what you've proposed, giving the pros and cons. I think I mentioned before but did not see your answer .... you'll need to figure out the total square footage that you want for patio space. It doesn't need to be to the square inch. You just need to get into the ballpark on it. While I'm not working to scale -- just proportion -- I estimate the patio in the sketch to be about 170 s.f., which does not count the pure walking space in front of the steps. Including that, it might be around 200 s.f. Keep in mind that in order to do the same functions (cook and eat) requires a little more room outdoors than it does indoors. Outdoors, people move about faster and flail their arms more :-).

I grow lots of fruit trees here. Fruit trees go good with roses as long as the trees dont get too big and shade the roses out too much. I just planted Mermaid rose yesterday several feet from a shrubby LSU purple fig. The LSU Purple figs dont get too dense of a canopy. I also grow: Starfruit, figs, dwarf black mulberry, Longan, lots of citrus (several lemon varieties, 2 Buddah's Hand, 4 Red Fingerlimes, Blood Orange, Ray Ruby grapefruit, Thai Lime, Persian lime), Hass avocado, Then I have a Miracle fruit and 15 little Jackfruit seedlings that are a few feet high lol. Also have dragonfruit and some diff types of berries, grapes. Probably more that Im forgetting about right now lol.

I’ll try to break this up into smaller pieces - I think it was the pictures I was adding re the ’lift’ that caused the problem maybe… I hope we get the expected extra light now that the tree is gone. I think we will but time will tell…. One of my biggest worries is what will happen when the 90+ year old neighbour on the south side dies and the property likely gets sold to settle the estate! I’m expecting a two-story house and a 6’ wooden fence…. I tried to take that into account when planning this work. We treated our ash for EAB a couple of times, but there was still noticeable deterioration. We were worried about branches falling on the roof. We decided to take it down now rather than wait until we were even older :-) The ‘lift’ folds up to a narrow thing that ( just barely) fit through the gate. They removed the ’bucket’ part - and out gate door - to get it in the yard. It just barely fit under the gate arbour. It moves on ’caterpillar’ treads contrilled by a hand-held remote thing. It is still parked on our driveway until they pick it up tororrow, so I got DH to take some puctures for you. The cost was not cheap but the business is capital-intensive with all the equipment and I’m sure finding qualified staff is not easy or cheap. Insurance costs are probably very high too. We haven’t got the invoice yet but the estimate for doing the three trees was $5,000Cdn. We have used the same company before to remove dead or dying trees that didn’t need the ’lift’ thing and they were $2,000 or less to do. I’ll put the pictures in a separate post….