From last year when I was doing yard work all year long I have a pretty good sense of local micro-seasons and know the rain stops after May.

So, I’ll want to start tamping down any loose soil on the rammed-earth ramp sloping up to the backyard gate so I can get a few cycles to compress it to water- (and plant-) impermeable hardpack before it dries too much. Most of the pulled weeds and dirt this year I dumped to build a slope down a bit into the shell of Blueberry Hill.

So I want to use that ramp to get down and smash all of Blueberry Hill and refill it with new compost by late April to get wet some and start decay processes, maybe break wood apart in Strawberry Ridge too, also I want the grass to be a bit past medium-length then to trap moisture by the ground so I’ll cut it tight in a week or so and throw that in to get rained on and paste things together.

When it gets dry weeds stop sprouting, last year pulling them was full-time by now and afterwards I used the time to trim all the trees, it’ll still free up some this year I guess I’ll use to get the renovation started.

Walked Strawberry Ridge down a bit and arranged a bunch of pressure-treated wood into a bonfire and called it a day with the sun still shining

kontextmaschine:

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.

Okay, after that I got out the polesaw and took off some minor stuff on the pine that was just suboptimal and kept anything from filling in to fix, and then I was like “uf, that exerts my weary back muscles too much” so I moved on

Then I did a bunch of weeding until I was like “uf, all this bending over exerts my weary waist muscles too much” so I moved on

And then I moved stuff around in the backyard and checked through my firewood and most of it seasoned fine but I separated out the stuff that was getting insubstantial with rot or covered in fungal spores until I was like “man this is all just much” so I moved on

Then I pulled some wood off Strawberry Ridge to smash up to add to Blueberry Hill, clearing it off to walk it down compressed, then rinsed off the wheelbarrow I’d been mixing mud in and poured the muddy water into some dry pine needles I’m encouraging to rot and firm into soil and I was like “c'mon that’s enough” so I came inside and had a milkshake I had delivered

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

Strawberry Ridge

The flower patch

Blueberry Hill

Annuals coming in out front

Alright, recovered from dragging those branches onto Strawberry Ridge in time to do a good bit of Smashing on Blueberry Hill. I can walk straight across from the fence gate rather than have to go around to get to the far side now!

1.5 days left budgeted which seems about right. Might have to drag some of those branches over to re-bulk Blueberry Hill out after some more smashing, but then a bunch of Strawberry Ridge was originally branches I dragged over when I started smashing last spring, so accounts balance.

Woke up and there was a tree service truck out front with a bunch of branches down.

Unlike the last guys, who were clearing out for a new pole very nimbly with good communication, this was a hispanophone crew doing line clearance by butchery. Two branches I wish they’d just cut back to the trunk instead of leaving stubs I’ll have to hire a crew (around wires) to clean up before they waterspout up. It is clear the last crew understood how trees grow and this one did not.

That said I did manage to claim the wood for Strawberry Ridge.

Okay, the snow’s retreated and it had pressed Strawberry Ridge down nice and packed, and Blueberry Hill enough I could take the parts that were already smashed flat and smash them super flat, so I did that for the ¼ on the perimeter I could teach from solid ground and hopefully those’ll bind as a solid base to start getting the rest tomorrow.

Realized that as of this last echo wave I can make do with 3 scoops creatine on waking/2 on sleep so I don’t get up in too much of a hole, but if I’m doing yard work I really need 4/2 or I get exhausted.

This 6 is a 3 scoop increase from before this wave, which had been 3 after starting at 4 last wave, but the *increased creatine demand* really includes about 2 scoop-equivalents my body makes itself every day, so while the last wave was really a 6 scoop increase in demand (and the original had been 10), this one was only 3, so it’s leveling off

Strawberry Ridge is just a pile of wood and leaves, without any of the treated fenceplanks that kept Blueberry Hill together but also I shoulda smashed earlier before their non-rotting mass kept direct rain off, so it’s already gotten a bit shorter as it rots and settles, we’ll see what the proportion of finally rotted soil height is to tell how many years it’s gonna take to level off this yard, I think only 3-6 at most at this pace but that’s gathering up every leaf in 2 square blocks, I’m not gonna keep that up every year

Went by Strawberry Ridge and someone had dumped some big branches on it, dragged them back to start rotting as the wood component of next year’s compost, I think 2 more years at the very least

Alright, it rained enough for me to blow up some of the already-ground-to-dirt leaves on a side block, now tomorrow I put them on Strawberry Ridge and get the leaves on the neighbor’s side of the side yard for Blueberry Hill and then I finish the leaf-gathering chapter for the year.

So I wanted more wood for Strawberry Ridge so I took my lopper and trimmed all the street trees in a block radius last week, which were either terribly overgrown, butchered by clueless trimming, or both.

Easier to ask forgiveness than permission, and anyway only one homeowner told me to stop. Like I say I can’t feel guilt or shame these days and I think it threw him that I cheerfully agreed.

Anyway, his tree still had leaves on and I guess they iced up because today I saw it lying in his driveway and he’d had to hire a crew on Christmas Eve to chop it up. I went down to say (Google translate bridging a language barrier) that they could dump their chipped load with me, and now the tree’s all on Strawberry Ridge.

Feeling pretty smug about that one.

So a nice little old lady down the block was so grateful for me collecting all the street leaves to dump on Strawberry Ridge she got me a nice card and tin of “Mediterranean sweets”.

It continues to be funny to me that the work that started with me trying to make the view out my window less ugly and weedy and even now consists in terraforming a piece of publicly owned land to my liking has apparently made me some sort of local hero of civic betterment

Dumped easily 20 trash cans worth of leaves onto Strawberry Ridge. Since I stripped all the curbs on the block for Blueberry Hill last year they’re bare – no previous years’ leaves rotting to dirt and growing weeds to catch the leaves this year, so they all blow down to collect in big drifts that’re easy to gather up.

That along with the side yard work where that realtor 2 or 3 years back told me all my work had made my neighbors tens of thousands of dollars richer, and since I’ve started cleaning up my neighbors in each direction have I guess realized that they looked underwhelming in contrast and/or the area was classing up to the point of being worth tidying…

Like, my looking out the window 5 years ago and being like “ah fuck, I should pull those weeds” has apparently cascaded into making the entire neighborhood look much better. Yay me!