Ugh, last night I hauled like 6 trash cans of leaves out of the gutter (when it rains the stream passing thru them turns them to mush and mud on accelerated schedule) to the compost heap (“Blueberry Hill”) to build it up and I’m hella sore now

When I was first tending the yard I was way overzealous about chopping up smaller branches for kindling so now I have a bunch of kitty litter (from before Badger went outside) bins filled with twigs, so I poured some on to contribute carbon

Today in yard work:

• Realized the way I was putting loose stones down to shape the hillock the compost pile is rotting into was wrong; changed it and it now looks much better.
• Realized that the reason the ramp in my backyard was so steep is leaves have been falling in it and rotting into dirt for decades and the “top” of it is really the top of the first of three courses of stone on the side walls. Got like two wheelbarrows of dirt out with like three or four left.
• Realized that the sandy ridge I exposed had been flowing downhill and if I dug it out I would notice I had actually built this retaining wall up like one now-buried flight higher so far this year.
• Realized if I made mud out of the dirt from the ramp then added in sand it would make a good solidifying paste to mortar the next flight on the wall in with.

Accomplishment!

So this is basically the product of this year’s yard work, a pile of felled tree plus five years of branches plus some rotting fence planks plus a lot of green waste turned into a compost pile that’s melting down to fill in a depression with me building up a slope from loosed stones to keep clear a path while building up that part of the side yard to plant blueberry bushes in, partially shaded by the pine.

This wasn’t originally intended as a compost heap, it was a pile of dead branches I realized would rot down faster if I dumped grass clippings on it