Our property is a rectangle, roughly divided into 3 parts.
One half is where the house, the workshop, the gardens, and most of the trees are.
The other half has the cabin, the well, the septic tank and the open field.
The
third half (yeah, I stole it from Car Talk) is a strip of wild forest
about 25 yards wide and about 150 yards long, running along most of the street.
We never go into it, but it's a nice buffer between the street and the property.
Plenty of birds and squirrels live there year round, and deer use it as an
occasional rest stop.
Lot of grass to cut. Photo at left shows the front yard as seen from the gate. The front yard doesn't look that big, but it's almost a football field in size.
The dark woods behind the house are a hundred feet further back - and don't belong to us. They're in a 4-acre lot that we worried would be clear-cut for a mobile home full of head-banging, glue-sniffing teenagers.
Tracing down the owner at the county courthouse, turned out were folks about our age living in South Carolina. We asked them to sell, or to give us first chance to buy. They said they were happy leaving the land as it is, basically wild. That was seven years ago. We don't think much about it anymore, except to admire and appreciate the wall of green peace in our backyard.
next: the woods along the street
home page 1. View from front gate 2. Woods along the street 3. Backyard 4. Cabin 5. Ending the visit