taking stock

first thing second: taking stock of our current resources....
   The house we moved into is awesome.  A 3 bedroom ranch affair with a fireplace, great insulation and two outbuildings, one an insulated shed with a covered porch that we've designated as our workshop and the other an open air shed that will be our potting and pottery shed, both with power and gutters.
  The front yard gets plenty of sun which is surprising considering the abundance of oaks in the neighborhood and the fact that it's on the north side of the house.
  The backyard harbors 4 fig trees, muscadine vines on a trellis attached to the open-air shed and a little circle of 2 maybe 3 small blueberry plants and another plant that might be some kind of raspberry.   Unfortunately the back only gets a little sun in the day which made me curious about the well-established figs and grapes.  Our next door neighbor grew up in the house and said they used to have a full-fledged garden back there when she was growing up, so my hypothesis is that the oaks in both backyards adjacent to ours have filled in in the intervening years and affected the fruit set (very few grapes and lots of figs that won't ripen).
   Which brings me to my next diatribe: the importance of neighborly relations.  I've lived in many places in suburbia and for some reason have never made the effort to really get to know most of my neighbors.  This is something I've resolved to rectify.  By talking to my next door neighbors and neighbors across the street I've learned about drainage patterns in the neighborhood, gotten permission to prune and take down trees to allow sun into the backyard, and been allowed to harvest an immense supply of rampant bamboo.  Holy crow, we've only been here a couple weeks.  It's time to integrate with our community, and I'm not talking about a community of like-minded individuals, I'm talking about embracing those who are geographically close regardless of ideology in an effort reclaim what it means to be human... working together not just to survive but to thrive.  Doing so will surely be beneficial.