Ashley River Park 8 '22

I've mentioned a couple of times that our new home is located near

 one of the Ashley River Parks.

It is one of the newest  Parks in the Ashleley River Park System and provides an impressive set of recreational offerings available to the public.

Unlike the first Ashley River Park we visited , Boating is not a major focus of this park.

While there is a boat launch on the premise, 

most of the facilities are not watercraft oriented.

There is a large childrens play ground bordered by picnic shelters on each side  so that the young ones can burn off some energy, while their parents relax in the shade.

Much of the equipment is state of the art in terms ofphysical education.  I swear a four-year-old could  safely train to compete for American Ninja Warrior  in this play ground.

There is also a splash park to help the kids cool off during

 our hot and muggy Southern Summer months.

(and may to keep them from trying to cool off in one of the larger fishing ponds).

Of course, there are  also  some spots set aside for the fur babies,

both large and small.

For more mature residents, the park has a  concert stand

 that surrounded by a huge lawn which  can accomodate a huge audience.

Beyond the concert area, is a huge freshwater fishing pond

with lots of docks for fishing. It's all catch an release of, course, 

but try to tell that to this guy , 

or any of the osprey that are buidling nests in the man-made

 Osprey nesting stands adjacent to the ponds.

And of course like all  of the Ashley River parks, there are miles  of walking trails

both through the park,

 and continuing on along the banks of the Ashley River to the next park in the series.

Visiting with the neighbors to the east: 8'22

Every morning at sunrise we are awakened by the sound of owls hooting in the trees in our backyard and shortly after we are reminded to get up by the sound of a rooster crowing, hens cackling, and geese honking.

We haven't really been able to walk past our back fence to see what the neighborhood behind us is like because there is a small creek and wildlife corridor  running along the rear property line of our neighborhood which creates a physical barrier between our housing development and the homes due west of us. So today we decided to hop in the car and find out where that damn rooster lives.  

Using our GBS mapping application, it did not takes us very much time to get to the street nearest to the back of our home,   but even knowing that we were standing directly behind our home, we found it hard to see our home through all the trees and shrubbery along the creek and in our backyard.

When we had first moved in at the beginning of Summer, the creek was quite noisy with the sound of rushing water,

The creek's water level has dropped enough over the summer that it is now now more of a small , quiet spring gently flowing through a wildlife corridor that is filled with native semi-tropical wetland plants.  It is really quite pretty and it does form a natural privacy screen.

Because of a very tall wooden fence around the back yard of the home nearest our yard, we never could see any of the chickens or the geese, but we could definitely hear them.  Judging by the number of fruit trees and other edible plants I could see overhanging the fence, the owner of this property is very into self-sufficiency farming.

He wasn't alone.  

We spotted several other homes in that housing development that were growing massive fruit and vegetable gardens.  I loved it!

A Paradise in the Making

The interior of this home was in good shape when we moved in  but all the yards were badly in need of trimming.  The first week we were here, Bruce dived right in and began trimming all of the trees in the backyard so they weren't smacking us in the face every time we stepped outside.

All fourteen of them!  

We have a forest of deciduous trees in our backyard.

Meanwhile, I (CC) tackled cleaning up the front yard.

The front yard area does not have as many trees as the backyard has.

There's just one large silver palm in the center of the lawn,

and 

five (5) mature Cycads are scattered in the front flower beds.

BUT

none of these plants looked like they had ever been trimmed!

AND

There were massive fire-ant mounds all over the front lawn and flowerbeds.

It took both Bruce and I  two weeks to get all of the  Virginia Creeper pulled off of the silver palm tree,

 and it took me another week to remove all of the dead fronds skirting the cycads.

Meanwhile, we were both engaged in a constant battle with the fire-ant colonies that had taken up residence all over the front yard.  TBD who is winning that war; every time I think they're gone, we find a new fire ant's nest.

The previous tenant had used two sideyards on either side of the house as utility storage areas

The yard on the North side of the property (above)  was covered from the fence to the house with a healthy (but badly overgrown) St Augustine lawn.

I plan on making this area a cut-flower garden and have been carefully removing 18" of the healthy turf from along the fence and house walls to make room for the new flowering plants. 

The yard on the Southside of the property (shown above) appears to have been used as parking for a boat &/or a recreational vehicle. This area was supposed to be covered from the fence to the house with St Augustine grass but instead has a large area adjacent to the house that is barren and void of anything but weeds. We are planning to turn this into a small raised bed vegetable garden. So far, we have managed to weed and covered the barren area with landscape cloth.  Then we moved all of the potted herbs that we brought with us onto the landscape cloth. 

As you can see from the photos above, we haven't put many plants in the ground. Virtually all of the plants we brought with us from Pawleys Island remain in the pots we brought them in, as are all of the new plants we have purchased since we came here.

In part that is because we are still waiting to determine how much sunlight and/ or shade different areas get,  so they will all have a suitable light exposure.  We also are waiting to determine how much difference there is in rainfall between Summerville and Pawleys so we can figure out how much watering we will need to do in different portions of the yard. (There aren't any sprinkler systems for any of the yards).

Even though our yard is not yet the lush garden of Eden we are envisioning it will become, we are pleased with the progress we are making, and our new neighbors are ecstatic that we are keeping everything so trim and tidy.  That alone is a huge improvement in their minds.

 

The Club at Pine Forest: 8 '22

 Today, Bruce and I golfed 9 holes each at The Club at Pine Forest.

The course's four-star ranking places Pine Forest in the top 5% of all non-private courses in the United States and making Pine Forest the highest-rated non-resort course in the Charleston area. The golf course is a Par 72 layout designed by Bob Spence, who is the lead designer for Davis Love III.

The course's website describes the course as having extremely challenging championship tees (6,905 yards with a course rating of 73.9 and a slope of 138) to more manageable gold tees (5,782 yards with a course rating of 68.7 and a slope of 121). Meanwhile, the ladies' tees measure 4,990 yards with a course rating of 70.8 and a slope of 115.+ So of course, we didn't expect it to be an easy course to play.

What we hadn't expected when we booked our Tee -off time was that on the day we played, temperatures would hover near 95 F in the shade with the high humidity, bringing the heat index up to 105 F.. On top of that it hadn't rained for several days so the course was so dry we had a tough time driving a Tee into the ground and made controlling our speed on the greens a really hard thing to do.

It was a bit naive to think either one of us would play well under those conditions, so of course, neither of our scores was anything to write home about. I struggled to maintain the height and distance to get over all of the moguls on this links-style course. And Bruce had difficulty walking the steep slopes.

All in all, we did reasonably well but were still disappointed by

our own performances. Oh well, maybe we'll try the course again, but if we do, we're definitely holding off on that game until the late Fall when the temperatures are cooler and Bruce has had his vascular surgery