When you move into a house that’s been abandoned for over 5 years, you realize just how quickly things go to pot. Every square inch. To pot. Each time I complete some miniscule piece of the project (that probably takes 10 hours, five band-aids, four episodes of therapeutic rage reduction, three beers, and an Epsom salt bath), I comment, “Ahh, now it’s starting to look like somebody lives here.”
This place is so small (.22 acres) that every inch needs to be manicured – there’s no room for wasteland, but taming it has been an ordeal. No offense to anyone who bush-hogs 50 acres for a living. But I’m crawling around yanking things out by hand, usually by myself, and sawing things down that usually fall on my head, and it’s full of poison ivy, and it’s been over 100 degrees here, which at least deserves a “bless your heart,” don’t you think?
Of course, around here, “Bless her heart” is usually followed by something like, “but she’s dumb as a stump.”
Anyway, bit by bit, it’s coming along. Here’s a shot of the back yard “before”:
And here’s the back yard today. 
It doesn’t look like much, but here lies several days of sweating. Turns out, that overgrowth was concealing a large assortment of huge buried rocks – guess somebody wanted a rock garden, then forgot about it, perhaps as a sinister joke on the next owner. I used them to pretty up the drainage ditch.
This afternoon I put down 10 bales of pine needles in the back yard. I went with pine needles because I was getting tired of shoveling out dirt and mulch from my pickup, one sweaty metric ton at a time. Compared to craziness such as that, pine needles are lightweight and really don’t feel much like work a’tall.
