To our home’s successor,

2019 was the year of low-budget street appeal. With some major electrical work underway, we decided to commit ourselves to tackling the yard. The entire property was and still is extremely overrun with invasive species. The hedgeline along the street was extremely overgrown and consisted of some MAJOR bittersweet vines that were choking things out. This first year was purely cutting out some of the monster vine stems… We’re talking 2” stems… Unfortunately for every stem you take out, there are a hundred sprouts that come up within weeks. It’s important to remove all of the root system which is not realistic in one pass. 

The bittersweet also took its toll on the spruces at the back of the property. We have been working every year since 2019 to pull the vines off the trees to stop the choke out. One of our early attempts to pull, severed the top of one of the spruces and we ultimately lost the tree in an ice storm in 2023. 

Okay but talk about the icehouse!

This beauty was known in the neighborhood by kids as “the fort” but it was at one time used as an icehouse.

*brief history intermission*

From what we’ve learned, Fitchburg had several ice dealers throughout the years harvesting at one of our many ponds. Ice was stored in sheds and covered with thick layers of sawdust or hay to preserve it. The previous owners likely purchased from one of these dealers prior to the invention of residential refrigeration. They’d then be able to preserve food here for longer.

So what is its current purpose? 

Well, nothing right now. But we’ve heard from long-time neighbors that it may have been used as a trash dump at one point- which honestly makes sense with the number of broken bottles, and aluminum cans in the rubble. The envelope certainly needs to be repointed and a wall cap of some variety needs to be installed to preserve this space and is high on our priority list. 

Since 2019, we have tackled some of the obvious trash pick-up, removed a number of volunteer trees, shrubs, and vines from the interior and we continue to remove some of the rubble and get a more level “floor”. I imagine at some point we will share what this space becomes.

I should also mention a little of our background at this point. Both of us are trained and licensed landscape architects and although we don’t practice at this point, we both have some strong opinions about our landscape design and it has at times held us up on decisions. I think we both believe that living in a space also helps shape our ideas, and so we continue to live in our space and learn how we use it and how we’d like to use it. This has evolved over the last few years, but we think we are getting closer to a plan. I would love to find some original plans or photos to see how our yard may have once been used and loved.