the rakes progress

i dunno if anyone who's just reading this and hasnt seen my house would remember our jungle of weeds which developed last summer and were killed last fall? well...yeah..i killed them with weed killer..but then i didnt get out there to pull them up right away..i was kind of afraid of the massiveness of the job.

what happened last year was...we'd had a new drain added to our septic system..and with that, they had to bulldoze the entire back yard. it made the place a very rocky..and very fertile..mess. weeds and stuff grew easily in the knewly organicaly fertilized yard...but even if we'd had a mower, we couldnt have used it back there for how uneven and rocky the yard had become...so the weeds grew...and then i broke down and began watering the back yard with weed killer every couple of days till they were at least dead weeds, instead of flourishing ones.

anyhow...i finally got tired of them..and knew that if i didnt get out there and take care of the dead ones, new ones would grow up in them and we'd have even worse of a mess on our hands!
so...today i grabbed a rake, put on some gloves...and tackled the yard.

okay..these weeds were probably around 3-4 feet high..and average about a quarter inch thick..but since they all were killed last year..they mostly popped right out of the ground..and those with roots too deep broke off right at the surface. it wasnt nearly as hard of a job as it could have been. realy, the hardest part is getting everything into piles...which i now have 4 or 5 of in the back yard. oh if there were three of me!

all in all, about two and a half hours work..on an augusta spring day (about 70 degrees) i'm sweaty but not miserably so..i feel good.

there are some new non-dead weeds out there..and i pulled up a bunch of them...but by the time i was done clearing out the twigy dead ones...my hands were blistered and my motivation to pull up live weeds was gone. so..another day, i'll get my weed killer and spray those guys:)

and another day, i'll ellect people to help me move those piles...with shovels and more rakes, maybe. or i'll clone myself a few times..and we'll all do it together.

i cant help but think that there has got to be an afordable way to make that backyard into a normal nice usable piece of land again....