Outdoor Life - Now With Photographic Goodness

A few things from my yard.

First, here's a picture of the baby hummingbirds. They don't do much but lay there and occasionally poop over the side of the nest, but they are much bigger than they were when they hatched. I'm guessing it's another week or so before they fly.

Here in Southern California, lots of houses are "zero-lot-line." This means that the house is built right on the edge of the lot, and your neighbor's yard comes right up to your structure. Our development is not technically zero-lot-line, but our neighbor on one side has an exclusive use easement in the front of our houses, right up to our house. This doesn't trouble me too much because we have a much larger easement on their lot in our back yard, giving us a bigger space. (Yes, "bigger" is a relative term. The yard is still small.)

What does bother me, though, is that the original owner next door planted trees right up against our house. There's not much I can do about it other than trim them where they touch our house or cross the roof line, which I tend to do with extreme prejudice.

The taller ones had started to scrape against our upper-story gutters, making a terrific noise in Cameron's room when it was windy. So I asked our neighbor to see if his gardener could trim them for him.

Neighbor stated that "the last time I asked them to do that they wanted to charge me extra," trying to use that as an excuse. (No kidding? You're asking them to do more work and they want more money? Those bastards!) So I told him not to worry about it, that I'd take care of it - which is what I had kind of hoped for in the first place.

I went to the hardware store, bought a tree trimmer, and lopped about four feet off the top of the offending trees:

Trimming these trees was most gratifying.

One last thing. We have a Japanese maple in our front entry - a nice red-leaf variety. It leafs out this time of year, looking great, but by July all the leaves are browned and dying. I try to keep it well-watered and well-fed, to no avail. This really bothers me - I really like the tree but it just isn't doing well. Anybody have any tips for an amateur arborist?