Landscaping Rehab - Pruning Crape Myrtles and Redefining The Edge Of A Bed - Share For Kimberly

Welcome back guys, it's the Tightwad and it's a beautiful spring day. Today is a great weekend to get some work done and I'm actually working in my neighbor's landscaping bed here. His wife's been sick so he hasn't been able to attend to it this year. I know you're here for landscaping tips but I wanted to share something with you so just give me 30 seconds before we move on. This is my neighbor Kimberly. I'm doing this work for her and her husband Sean. Kimberly had an illness this year that left her losing both of her hands and both of her legs below the knee but you can see one thing she didn't lose is that beautiful smile. I wanted to do this project so that I could donate all of the proceeds from this video directly to them. I'm also going to have their GoFundMe link shown on the screen right now so if you don't have money to donate to GoFundMe, make sure that you share this video with all of your friends. The more people that see it and hit that thumbs up, the more money I make and the more money I can donate to them over the next year. If you're having trouble with the link, check the description or the pinned comment. I'll have a link directly to the GoFundMe there as well. And now let's get back to the landscaping. As you can see it's a little bit overgrown. There is no defined edge lines around the outside. He has a sweet gum tree that's been growing out of this bush for a while that I'm going to take care of for him. So it's going to take me several different days to do different projects in this bed and I'm going to take you step by step along the way. Today we're going to start with the crape myrtles. As you can see they're pretty grown up and they have a lot of suckers that have grown up from the bottom down here and over here. So I'm going to take care of those, get these nice and cleaned up for you because these have plenty of room to grow. If you have crape myrtles planted in an area that doesn't have room for them to grow to their full potential, I will link a video in the top right corner of the screen right now so you can see the proper way to do what people commonly refer to as crape myrtle. It doesn't kill the trees, it just controls the growth. But today I'm just going to thin these out and print out some cross branches and I'll show you step by step along the way. I'm going to start at the bottom down here and there's quite a mess down here with a lot of old growth that I'm going to try to remove but I can't do it with my loppers that I brought with me. So I may have to get some more tools but I want to try to get rid of all of this stuff right here because all it does is shoot up suckers every year and cause problems and it also promotes disease because it's down here at the bottom, everything just gets trapped down inside it. So I'm going to kind of work my way up today from the bottom and trim off all these pieces that are just sticking out. And I'm using just regular loppers today, they're about 10 years old, I do need a new blade on it, I'll probably buy one of those tomorrow so that I can do some cleaner cuts on some of these things. But I'm just getting the bulk out of the way today. You can see right here is a knot where they were pruned back to this level at some point and that's why that big knot exists. I may even decide to take out a whole trunk from the tree here but right now I'm just working my way around. Then I'm just going to work my way up and anytime there's a big knot with a bunch of pieces I will just shave that clean so I'll have a nice clean start. The bottom of the tree is already looking better so we're going to come up here and start focusing on this top section and there are way too many branches coming off so I'm going to thin those out and make sure anything that's crossing is pruned off. I'm also going to prune anything that's not growing in an upward motion. Alright, so you can see I cleaned up the bottom, still have to do the very base down there. I took off all the small branches and then when I got up here I had to do some reparative cuts, these had a bunch of different pieces coming out. But I cut it down so this strong branch here can continue to grow and develop. There are no pieces crossing over each other, that was my goal is to leave at least one strong branch out of each of these so you can follow it up and see there's one main one coming off and there's another one here and the same thing over here. So anything that had three or four forks I went ahead and trimmed and you can see we still have a canopy and it will be really healthy this season and hopefully over this year's pruning and next year's pruning we can restore some of the knots and the growth here back to a nice beautiful trunk. Now it's time to work on the weeds in the bed and I'm going to use a non-selective herbicide that will kill all grass and weeds that are present and I may have to apply this two or three times before I get all of them. Then I'm going to come back with a preen product that is a pre-emergent that will prevent additional weeds from germinating and sprouting. I'm now ready to create the border for this bed and I've already come in with my non-selective weed killer and killed the grass all the way around so you can kind of see the brown line and I have this shovel with a flat edge on it and one way you can do this is to go around the whole thing sticking in like this and you're working your way around the bed. So the first step is going on the outside here. You want to go two or three inches down. This is a little bit hard here. Ideally you would do this after a rain. So you're going to go all the way around the bed from the outside and then you're going to spin around to the inside and come at an angle and go back in and you're going to be pulling out this from the edge. As you can tell this is a very labor intensive way but it does absolutely work and it's a good solution if you need to save some money. What you're going to end up with is a defined edge here and then a V going down to it from this side and if you can get below the roots so this area where it creeps and crawls it'll prevent the grass from growing into your bed in the future and then you can fill up that groove with mulch which we'll be doing today. That takes us right into the second option which involves some pretty commonly used lawn maintenance tools and here I'm using a stick edger which is a rotating blade on the end of this device and then I come back with a weed eater at an angle to get that V so the stick edger goes straight down like the shovel from the outside and then the weed eater or a string trimmer works as the cuts from the inside of the bed and then I can come back with a blower and blow all of the dirt and grass out of that V leaving us another nice defined edge. After I did some of my work yesterday my father-in-law told me that my wife's uncle had this Stihl brand bed edge redefiner and it's got this really nice big blade on it and it's got also a really nice guard to prevent it from throwing stuff on you so I'm going to try this on this edge and see how it does. I think this would be the ideal solution so let me check it out. So I went around the whole outside edge it took me three or four minutes to do the whole thing you can see it cut a groove along the edge I'm going to get the blower and blow that groove out so you can see it a little cleaner. All right so I went back and blew out most of the loose dirt here and that's important to do so that the it doesn't just pack back down and allow the grass to grow through it As you can see I've got a nice inch or two height here I could go a little bit lower to completely prevent the roots from growing through but you can see right here the runners for that Bermuda are chopped so most of them are growing above the level that I cut at. I am going to make a full video for this edge definer while I have it so I'll link that in the top right corner right here if you want to know more about it we'll talk about the motor size needed and how it works and where you can buy them so check that out in the top right corner and I'm going to go ahead and get this project finished up. So I've pruned the crepe myrtles I pruned any of the bushes that needed to be pruned I removed the tree that was growing up in one of the bushes I killed all of the weeds and put down a pre-emergent to prevent weeds from growing up in the future I defined the edge of the bed and now the last step is to add some type of mulch I personally use pine straw in my beds but this neighbor loves the red mulch so I went to Home Depot they had a 5 for 10 sale so $2 a bag and I was able to buy enough mulch to do the entire bed it took me about 40 bags of mulch so I spread the mulch throughout the bed you can either use your hands or you can grab a garden rake like you see I'm using here and push it and pull it around the bed and make sure you fill in all the way to the edge of the grass so you're filling in that little channel where the dirt used to be and that's going to prevent dirt from piling back up in that area all right guys here is the finished product you can see a little bit of lines in here that'll blend in as this mulch dries out like this mulch already has but you can see the crepe myrtles look nice and pruned we decided not to prune the hawthorns to let them grow to their natural form they already have pretty decent natural shape some of his bulbs have started blooming since we started the project so those are looking nice we got a nice clean edge all the way around I wanted to share a little bit more about Kimberly and most of you probably assume that her illness was COVID related but it wasn't at all she had a blockage to her kidneys which caused sepsis she actually went under cardiac arrest and was resuscitated from that and then she was put into a drug-induced coma for a while and that is one of the reasons why she ended up losing her hands and her legs because the body focuses on the main portions of the body and doesn't pump blood and other things needed to the extremities of your body and I'm not going to pretend to be a medical doctor to give you all the diagnosis for her but cognitively Kimberly is exactly how she has always been she still has an amazing spirit she still loves Jesus she still has that awesome smile but her husband Sean is her primary caretaker so he has been unable to work since January and that's why I wanted to donate 100% of the money made on this video directly to them one of the needs that they have right now is a handicapped van so that he can transport her easily to and from doctor's appointments but without a job he can't show any income so he can't get finance for a van so we're trying to raise some money to help him do that so if you have any connections to help out with that you can feel free to reach out to me at tightwadrepairs at gmail.com or you can message them directly through that GoFundMe link if that GoFundMe link is not working for you I'll also post it in the description and in the pinned comment please consider sharing this video with as many people as possible the more views the video has the more money YouTube makes the more money they pay me and the more money I can give to Sean and Kim so 100% of the money that I collect will go straight to them I will be providing them with a check every month for the next 12 months for this video.