Oh also spent a lot of the afternoon staring closely at my backyard to notice slightly different shades and shapes of green, or more likely the tiny white flower of bittercress plants and snipe them before they can go to seed

It’s tedious and repetitive, but it pays off, after two years doing this for purple deadnettle I’m seeing only very isolated sprouts this year for stuff that apparently stayed in the seed bank for 3

Also clearing like 6 of the broadest and roughest-bladed, leggiest, or just badly shaped grass species, it helps that mowed-short grass seed mostly doesn’t travel that far so even if something survived to set seed previously there’s just a patch of special interest around there to focus on and I don’t need to go hunting all across the yards for rogues (though I can pretty readily distinguish between at least 20 grass species on sight – I can’t say “oh that’s #16”, but I’m like “oh, that’s one of those shorter-habited non-creeping non-bunchgrasses with more but thinner blades so it really cultivates moisture down there, but not the one that’s really more yellow-green towards the base or the one that feels fluffy”

The side yard (thinned those trees out a lot last year)

Strawberry Ridge

The flower patch

Blueberry Hill

Annuals coming in out front

Ok did a bunch more weeding in the lower backyard – gonna eliminate my lowest-ranking grass this year, a big rough creeping beachgrass I only let survive into this year to consolidate a pile of bamboo rhizomes and it’s time for succession to the next species, baby.

There’s a tough clover down there I’ll take out outliers, edge back its one main patch, maybe even get all of it this year but not before it sets seed, so really 3 more years of cleaning it up as the very last untamed wilderness around here.

Smashed up more Blueberry Hill, the 2 sections I thought were just 2 more smashing sessions deep each might be 3, got 1 of 6 done.

Finding I’m better at bending down to the ground now, doesn’t sting the waist so much but I feel it in the inner thighs now, I think I might be lowering myself by bowing my knees out, umpire-style

Used my new tamper (less area on the head, which I first thought inferior but now realizes it stamps down with more force per square inch) to pound some new dirt into where I’m tamping the side yard into a rammed-earth ramp up to the backyard gate

Lugged some stones down to mark off a flower patch fed by two ditches at the base of Strawberry Ridge where the ramp goes up from the woodchip path

Feel bad for getting less than I could done in a day but then I remember I have no deadlines and I’m still making progress.

Well, I need to do the earth ramming for the side ramp while there’s still moisture in the dirt, and planting some cover will be month-dependent but I honestly don’t even know what and I can do that next year at worst, I’ll be here for a while.

Doing weeding after the first rain since a lot of stuff started to sprout, used the soil pulled out to construct a ramp of solid ground back onto Blueberry Hill where I can smash up the remainder

…and fill in with debris from the power line downed branches which I’ve been smashing up against Strawberry Ridge

Seeing more and more people take that path, part of it it lines up a good shot down to a respectable park/elementary school/cut-through to a shady route to walk/bike south, but I can even overhear from their comments walking by that part of it’s just they like the side yard as I’ve made it and prefer to come that way, it makes me feel really proud, I remember moving in when it was a total mess with a worn-muddy path through a field of broadleaf weeds with a tree-of-heaven nest (that it was a right bitch to untangle and cultivator mattock the roots from) and a blackberry bramble hanging from my (then-intact!) fence

But then again I remember – less than a decade ago! – when multiple houses on the block had bars on the windows.

In planning for the future of Karafuto I’m considering the possibility that before it reaches end-life the neighborhood will densify to the extent you at least want wrought-iron fencing if not window bars, that drifter knocking on my bedroom window from the backyard today reimpressed that that there are things that scale of defense is for

So when I weed i also do the parking strips in a 1-house radius (I’m on a corner, so both sides) and I’m just really happy with this unloved bit that I didn’t get to get down to grass but I’ve turned from a chaotic, weedy mess to like two stretches of monocrop nice cover

Just experienced a startlingly tranquil period of weeding then remembered I’d taken an edible an hour before

The side yard where Blueberry Hill and Strawberry Ridge are is technically a city right-of-way (basically, a short street block that never got 3 of the 4 adjacent households voting to tax themselves to pave; the next block would’ve been too steep to continue anyway), not my property, I guess it feels fine to dump leaves and branches on (they fell there anyway!) but not hire people to terraform.

Beyond that I’m gonna hire people to do the house remodeling and of course I didn’t particularly do anything to acquire the resources to buy the house in the first place, so having part of the process involving mixing my labor with the products of the soil fills in there.