Work on the yard

Let's take a short break from the red carpet posts so that I can talk about my weekend. I was hoping that we were going to have a boring weekend where we sat around and I watched Ian play video games but that isn't what happened at all.

Our neighbour had given us some topsoil a while ago and we wanted to use it, together with some other soil we had at the top of the hill, to re-grade the yard at the side of the house. Ian bought a wagon/cart thingy with which to transport the soil and he started working. I joined him after a nap and we spent a few hours scooping, moving, and raking the soil to grade it. Half of the soil came from the top of the hill and half from the bottom. Ian did most of the moving, which was hard work, and I did the raking which was also hard work.

This took a few hours and both of us were very tired when we were finished. We were so tired that we didn't even bother making dinner but ordered pizza - something that we haven't done in ages - and we lazed around watching tv for the rest of the evening. Both of us slept very well after all that work.

We told ourselves that we would definitely take it easy today after doing so much work yesterday. We started off by cleaning up the pepper pots in the greenhouse, clipping off some dead birch tree branches, and talking about what we wanted to do with the side of the house. We'd pretty much decided that we wanted to put a vegetable garden at the top of the hill in front of the greenhouse, and wouldn't it be great if we could use the sod from that area to cover the fresh soil we'd put down yesterday.

Our neighbour came by to chat with us and after telling him about our thought, he offered to bring over some power tool that can be used to cut the sod into strips about 18" wide. Those strips can then be cut to make manageable bits of sod. It took about an hour and a half to cut up the sod from our proposed vegetable garden area (about 12 by 16 feet). We spent that time rolling and moving sod.

We also spent time killing grubs. We have about one grub per square foot and since it isn't even the time that they'll be in their greatest numbers, we'll need to keep an eye on them. We might need to get ourselves some nematodes. We also discovered a third species of ant in our backyard in some of the decomposing wood. So now we have the little brown ants; the larger, black, aphid-herding ants; and the little red ants that like wood.

When we finished rolling up the sod, we spent another two hours putting it into our cart, taking it down the hill, and laying it out. We got the whole side of the house re-sodded and by the time we were done we were exhausted. So much for taking it easy. I think almost every part of me is sore from all that bending and lifting and carrying and moving it around.

There's a lot more work to be done in setting up our vegetable garden. We need to get more topsoil and choose some vegetables to plant. We'll put some of the peppers out there as well as some carrots but we're not sure what else we want to grow. Right now we're both so tired from all that work that we don't want to even think about doing anything else out there.