This is what I get to look at out the window. When I moved in that woodchip path was mud, there was a tangled stand of so many trees of heaven their (also tangled) roots put out enough poison to kill grass, both sides of the path (the far side is wildflowers now) AND the ledge within the retaining wall were overrun with dandelions, deadnettle, nettles, other broadleafs, bittercress, seafoam, and crabgrass, a thick tangle of blackberry canes hung off the fence on the other side of the chimney, that bush in the foreground was grown high enough to block the window, and the trees had a ton of thin, twisted, dead, witchy branches at window level and an overgrown carpet canopy up above blocking light and making the whole area look like a cartoon haunted forest.

But that allllll changed cuz of me!

headspace-hotel:

Here’s some more Biodiverse Memes! Y'all are strongly encouraged to repost to Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and other websites. No need to credit.

Some of these are new, some are from earlier. Wanted to make some (somewhat) positive ones since the point isn’t to be “anti-lawn,” it’s to get people to appreciate how beautiful and important biodiversity is and how easy it is to have biodiversity in your surroundings :3

Go wild, give them to the other websites so the people there can see

If you’re trying to get a mossy lawn back to grassy, as I did with the upper backyard, the issue is moss will take over where the dirt is kept waterlogged, you need to aerate it for drainage.

Okay, more picking off crap grass, four buckets of it, also some chopping some thin branches up into debris kibble, and realizing a lot of the “firewood” I’ve been husbanding is really too thick to burn intact but a bitch to split, so if I really want to make good use of these fruits of the yard I can just dump them in a depression to the side of Blueberry Hill to rot over 5 years.

Tomorrow the last of that, using staples to shape some branches’ growth around trunks, and preparing some planters to receive some plants currently in areas that’re gonna be landscaped away.

Too rainy for yard work today, though I did use a lull to go look at one of the cut yards and use my aerating corer where water was pooling

Alright, three buckets of grass weeding, mowed the upper backyard and poured the clippings on Blueberry Hill.

Ok, more grass weeding, cleaned the bottom backyard so well there was nothing on the grass and mowed it, brought the felled mimosa branches to be chopped up.

Alright, went to clean up the lower backyard, do more grass weeding in the side yard, then went to finish smashing Blueberry Hill but I’m closer to the energy limits of my creatine dose and it was another tease, only halfway. Then I blocked some parking spaces for the crew coming tomorrow (at 8 AM!) to get up around power lines and trim the last untouched tree on the property.

kontextmaschine:

Okay, the grass is long enough I can recognize species at a glance by blade or form or color, so thinning it out before I mow, took out a lot of bunchgrasses, spikegrasses, and beachgrasses, not to mention a few stray deadnettles, some clover I wiped out last year but not before it set seed, and seafoam is back, that’s the real tiny stuff. No more bittercress, though.

Taking a break for some salmon rice and I’ll be back out.

Alright, got several bucketloads and dumped them on the ramp which now isn’t draining into a matrix of twigs so much as shrinking from drying.

Then built almost all of the next bonfire, the lower backyard’s really clear now.

So next is

• getting mud for the retaining wall
• finishing and burning the fire
• stringing a rope to block a gap in the fence with a tarp
• mowing the grass

then once it’s short

• hunting for seafoam

Okay, the grass is long enough I can recognize species at a glance by blade or form or color, so thinning it out before I mow, took out a lot of bunchgrasses, spikegrasses, and beachgrasses, not to mention a few stray deadnettles, some clover I wiped out last year but not before it set seed, and seafoam is back, that’s the real tiny stuff. No more bittercress, though.

Taking a break for some salmon rice and I’ll be back out.

Okay, went to smash that last bit of Blueberry Hill, found some steady ground to the side but after a few swings realized it was steady cause it was thin dirt atop some still-intact planks, so I smashed them for a while.

Also weeding, clearing out this one grass from the front that’s much taller (and leggier and unplush) that used to be like 80% of the cover.

Taking an hour break then I’ll go back out, got some other stuff in mind.

Alright, started on the little bit of Blueberry Hill left to smash but it really was left til last because it had the least stable ground to stand on and after a few swings realized I wasn’t gonna have my big finish today.

So instead I edged it (ba-dum-tiss).

I also finished off all the weeding circuit except the yards – front and top rear – within the retaining wall, took the time to try to totally clear some subpar grasses out while the soil’s still moist and good to dig out clumps.

Dumped 3 buckets of pull onto my ramp down into the Blueberry Hill dugout shell, that’s just loads dumped on wood fill full of air pockets so when it rains dirt drains down there and I gotta keep packing more on.

Tree in the top backyard starting to bear leaves, there’s a part where I cut two trunks to mount a bench and table, and shoots are growing off the sides right to thicken to be trimmed into a candelabra of supporting pillars in time.

Okay after going down to 4 scoops/day last week failed I tried to do 4 day/1 night, and that left me too sluggish to smash, so I just did 4 full buckets of weeding.

So I guess I’m not as on the verge of stepping down as I thought, which means we should expect my final weight to come in on the lower end of the range I predicted, average side of slim or even plain slim.

OK, gathered up the last of the wood, there’s one pile of staves too thick to bother bashing, one of ones too short, and one of ones I’ll give a pass at smashing into two each of Category B but just set out to rot intact if they don’t break.

Then cause I’ve been smashing wood all week I started another weeding circuit. There be some tiny ass bittercress in the world, the little white flower not even above the surrounding grass blades.

Crazy I can take my lawn corer to some muddy puddles, extract some cores to improve drainage, and then not only do the puddles drain but the mud becomes visibly drier while it continues to rain

Okay, coughing only felt like a dull, muffled pain today so I threw the maul a few times, still gonna be a day or two more though. Did more prepping and sorting of the wood I’m gonna fill Blueberry Hill in with afterwards.

Have totally eliminated some of the grass species that grow big & fast but low-quality, realized this will change the timing to mow them to leave them reasonably long for the hot season.

One thing I’ve learned about weeding is when you look over a patch of ground for weeds sprouting you have to bob your head a little, cause if you don’t and there are any stationary in your literal blind spots your brain will hide it by sampling from the nearby ground and using a clone tool

dduane:

adamtheredbeard:

adamtheredbeard:

I can help you out with one, but not the other

Viking Wood Splitter – A new level of chopping wood has arrived.

cc: @petermorwood: should we bother getting one of these, or have we got a plain old sword we can repurpose? 😏 (…without destroying it, of course…)

Oh wait, I was wondering how I would keep using these smashing muscles after everything was done AND disappointed with trying to blunt-smash logs through a splitter wedge drill-secured into a stump…

The neighbor tending the other side of the side yard is a good guy and he’s stepped up his game since I’ve cleared out the weeds that made trying anything there pointless, but he just has no sense of where to plant things, he’s constantly putting saplings of canopy trees in the shadow of established ones or planting things where they’ll grow branches out into the pathway or in the way of other stuff

kontextmaschine:

Uf, when I did some smashing yesterday after the epic day prior I appreciated once the periods where I had to go do something else for a while I could just take a few minutes’ break, the sets I used to need a break between I just needed to catch my breath again and the stuff where I once needed a breather I just readjusted my grip on the maul.

I also stopped in part cause I was actually getting sore in the shoulder and now waking up my core is tight in the way that means growth. But so no smashing today, though I might take the maul to split up some stumps.

Alright, got to those stumps, 3 I didn’t destroy but opened up the inside wood to the elements in a way that’ll rot them, 3 I cut last year a/o had a service come for two years ago are still too hard and intact and need another year or more of decay.

And that definitely exhausts my capacity to swing that thing for the day.

Haha, just realized all these “what the fuck is this” sprouts coming up in this one area for years are just suckers off a well-buried tree root that don’t resemble the mature tree