(no subject)

[which_chick]

When I moved into my house, the grounds around the house looked like a clearcut. This was because it *was* a clearcut. Stumps and large piles of rotting vegetable matter (It helps if you think of them as compost heaps or slow-moving gnolls or un-moving knolls.) have been landscape features of my yard for eight years, now. The stumps were there because I wasn't willing to run a bulldozer all over my proto-yard. It compacts the soil when you do that, see. The piles of rotting vegetable matter were there because, in the process of making yard from forest floor, you run into a lot of organic matter that is too wet to burn. Besides, I didn't HAVE topsoil to speak of. Throwing away perfectly good proto-dirt seemed like a dumb thing to do... I was going to need actual dirt for a garden and flowers and if I just made piles of the stuff, it would eventually become dirt. This struck me as less work than loading the stuff on a truck and hauling it away. So, large piles of rotting vegetable matter became landscape features in my yard. (Full disclosure: There was also, for a period of not more than two years, a blue toilet in my yard. It came with the house, and there was no way I was having a house with a blue toilet in it. Besides, how do you throw away a toilet? In the yard, it wasn't bothering me. In the house, it would have. Fortunately I live so far out in the sticks that the presence of a blue toilet in my yard didn't cause much comment, except among family members, where it was an unending source of cheap amusement, and far be it from me to remove such a simple pleasure from them. Eventually, my brother Roy and my dad, tiring of the toilet jokes, threw the toilet away.) Anyway, since I moved in to my house, stumps and heaps of compost have been slowly giving way to actual yard, at what the rest of my family considers a glacial rate of progress.

Today I removed the last compost heap in the front yard. I also took out most of the two stumps it was located between -- I was hoping that the wet and bacterial/macroinvertebrate activity from the compost heap would accellerate the demise of the stumps, and I think that worked out okay. I flattened the compost pile out and used the rich, black dirt it had become to level out the area and fill in the holes where the stumps had been. I'll be able to mow over it with a lawnmower as soon as I have grass on it to mow. The front yard still has a couple of stumps, disguised by shrubberies and perennial flowers, but more than half of the ones I started with are now gone and I can run a lawnmower over where they used-to-be. I am confident of an eventual victory in this little war of attrition.

And I need to cut the grass again. *sigh*