We’ve been working on the inside of the house a lot, and I haven’t been worried about much gardening related, except for one essential task:
No more green meatballs!
To recap, here it is when we first bought the house:
And now:
With a small chainsaw, and a persistent husband all the horrible hedged evergreens are gone.
I’ve also planted some strawberries, that were slated for demolition at a friend’s house, on the hill. Otherwise, I’ve just been waiting, thinking and observing. And now it is cold and getting colder, so the garden will wait until spring.
Liz Braithwaite 
I would love to know more about how you removed the stumps. We had some similar shrubs in our backyard. We cut them all the way down, but we couldn’t get the root balls out. They were huge! We thought we’d need to rent some equipment to do it. We didn’t want to, so we left them in and planted our garden around them. If you have any tips for getting them out without renting heavy-duty equipment, I’d love to know about it. Thanks!
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The trick for us was a long solid post hole digger/tamper bar. We dug them out quit a bit and they were still very stuck, but after we bought the bar, the leverage enabled us (more accurately my husband) to start shifting the stumps. Then we cut roots as we found them attached, and then finally pulled them out. If you’ve left them alone for a few years, I would try again too, because they have probably rotted.
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