Yesterday walked for hours with Amy, spying on people’s yards, siphoning inspiration for landscaping. Our backyard is tabula rasa – craggy, hard-pack dirt and clay, nothing doing. All brown, all the time. It’s going to be transformed. Today off to Yardbirds home and garden (like Home Despot, but left over from before the days of neighborhood-squashing superchains; groovy 60s bird logo, too) to order sod and topsoil. Spent rest of the afternoon with hoe and rake, cracking open difficult soil, removing rocks and weeds, chopping clods, slicing out roots, prepping the earth for the lawn we’ll install next weekend. This is one of those elemental tasks that makes you feel like a homesteader. “This dirt is difficult and I hate it, but dammit, it’s our dirt.”
Soil
Music: Cream :: born under a bad sign
As I sit here in the 38 degree weather here in NJ I think to myself “It’s awfully cold for laying sod”. Then the realization hits me.
I like winter, and I like seasons, but sometimes I envy you CA bastards!
I remember that feeling! In our last-but-one home in London, I spent a rewarding winter actually _removing_ all trace of living things from our garden – the whole plot was overgrown with bindweed and brambles, things which re-grow from the minutest of roots left in the soil. It was back-breaking mind-numbing rollicking good fun first trashing all the growth and then digging, sieving and re-digging, week after week, the cold soil to remove every little microscopic root remain.
That made me remember Yardbirds. My grandparents in Vallejo took me to one once when I was visiting out west as little kid. Image of retro bird logo suddenly came back from deep memory storage. Glad to know they’re still out there.
Good luck with your yard!