Taking the yard back in piles

Those of you who know me know that Queenie likes nothing better than to potter about in a garden/ yard/ farm/ pumpkin field/balcony pots/ terrace/ whatever.

So long as she has to scrub her fingernails afterwards, despite wearing a pair of gloves, she's happy.

As you can imagine, with a whole acre to play with, I am now in Queenie Heaven.

Every evening, I get home from work, I change into my yard clothes, I water my seedlings (my watermelon seeds started to sprout today) and I tackle something.

Someone in work asked me about my yard today (note - a yard in Canada is a garden, not a yard).

I said it was an okay yard, but it wasn't my yard, so it would probably take me about three years to get it right.

Probably 4 - 5 then, he said. Totally serious.

Probably he's right, he seems like a guy who knows what he's talking about.

So, five years....

I knew this year would be the back-breaking, re-organizing year, but all we seem to be doing is creating piles.

Piles and piles of stuff the previous people left behind.

There's the pile of paving stones.

They're everywhere.

Not just the piles.... the stones.

Coming from the Paddy Egan 'put the tools away' School of Gardening, I'm pretty anal about a place for everything and everything in its place, so when I find a paving brick, I have to put it on the pile.

Pretty soon, we had gotten down past the grass and they were everywhere, and that involved so much walking I was getting nothing done so I have created several piles.

I don't even like them.

The bricks.

Not that I like the piles either.

They're the red brick pavers... you know the ones.

There are three types: the octogon on top of a rectangle one that looks like a grandfather clock, the one that looks like a grandfather clock cut in half, and the rectangular one.

I have found over two hundred already... lying just about everywhere in our yard.

And I am such a weakling I can only put twelve in a wheelbarrow and carry them to the main pile, so it's taking a while.

There's something a little depressing about spending a whole day hauling someone else's boring red brick paving stones around the yard.

But HEY!!! When I get bored, there's the pile of building supplies.

It's bi-located - one pile under the blue tarp to be taken away, the other in the building for re-use.

There is building deitrus everywhere.

Wooden steps. Balustrade spindles. Large round balls for the tops of the spindles. Roofing felt. Wood. More wood. Gyprock. Rotting gyprock (the worst task so far). Different kind of more wood. Aluminium piping. Bathroom tiles. Copper piping. Lead piping. Paint cans. Tools.

Parts of cars.

ugggggghhhh.....

Then, you lift something up and you find a little pile of fiddlerheads.

Or tulips.

It's kinda fun in a back-breaking way.

We are trying to reuse as much as we can, but while we think what to do with the stuff, it's in a pile.

We found three huge tarpaulins.

I'm talking really expensive well-made stuff here.

Someone obviously had a boat at some point.

Then, I started to get mad...

One day, after about an hour, I finally dug up a really nice canvas tarp for a speed boat. Left out in the yard until it sank under the grass and rotted.

GODDAMN. IF YOU'RE GONNA LEAVE IT FOR ME PUT IT IN THE GODDAMN BUILDING SO I CAN USE IT.

Our building (which in Canada is the shed, not the main building) is a sturdy old New England type three room affair with a woodcote on top. I love it. We are going to put a wood stove in it so we can be outside in the winter. Sort of.

On Sunday, I realised it has a beautiful attic. With throw open windows at both ends and a warm, sweet-smelling spruce floor. it's going to make the most wonderful summer sleeping room for kids who are staying, or adventurous adults. All we have to do is build a sleeping platform and redo the mosquito nets... simple.

It took me a while to realise the potential. We're all a little more fire alert now, seeing as we're only two weeks into fire season and we've already had one major conflagration.

Sunday, I remembered seeing a lot of paper rubbish in the attic. I hauled myself up the ladder.

Five enormous garbage bags full of squirrel-chewed styrofoam later, I found the floor.

Forty five moving boxes (to add to our collection) later, I realised there was a second window. Four chest-height boxes full of random pieces of paper later, I just started throwing stuff out the windows.

Himself got a barrel and started burning the crap because we have enough piles.

But now, see photo above...I have a whole new pile.

Six in fact.

(I would just like to point out that I hauled all that shit out of the ground BY MYSELF).

There's one pathway into our little wood and with a little work it can be brought back to its original bucolic bliss - someone who used to live here worked really hard on it and planted all kinds of forest floor stuff, including fiddler heads and primroses and lupins and other flowers. But I haven't been able to find the end of the path - where it leads to.

I figure it must be near the building, but there's an enormous pile of brush left over from a tree fall lying there.

At least that's what I thought it was.

This evening, I waded into it and started lifting some of the brush.

And I found a cord of wood underneath.

A friggin' cord of wood.

Note: In Canada you buy wood in cords. A cord of wood is worth about $150 - $200 depending on the wood.

About four cords will get you through a winter.

So, wood is useful. It is currency. People need to buy it.

This wood was rotting.

The top layer was fine.
The second layer was softish, but it'll dry out.
The third layer was an interesting example of how wood fibre breaks down.
The fourth layer is what we call mulch nowadays.
The fifth layer was peat.

So now I have six more fucking piles.

In my driveway.

Brush.
Good wood.
Wet wood.
Useless wood
Mulch.
Peat.

Soon, I will be able to get a grant to open a garden centre.

I should be happy I suppose, I could spend years trying to get this level of decomposition going.

But the thing is, I live on the Eastern Shore, where there's lots of wood, and lots of wood stoves and lots of houses that would embarrass you with the beauty of their enormous wood pile. But I drive past houses every day that have a wood stove chimney and no wood outside and I always wonder.. is it some old couple that can't get any wood, or can't afford to buy wood or just need wood for some reason or another.

But there's always a truck in the yard, so the people in the house could come get some free wood if it were available. And they knew about it.

Himself drove in as I was working myself up into a tantrum about the needless death of the trees, and the waste of biofuel, and the lack of community spirit, yadda yadda... plus I was after pulling the leg attached to my recently Yoga/Pilates obsession with The Plank-destroyed right knee out of a particularly deep and dangerous mulch hole.

Maybe they were trying to fill in this space so it wouldn't get washed out....

WITH A CORD OF FRIGGIN' WOOD?

Maybe not...

Or maybe they just didn't like dirty fingernails too much.

They liked ball games. I have found - two soccer balls, a rugby ball, a volleyball, a tennis ball, a space hopper, and a basketball so far....

I've been trying to think what kind of little community festival I could have here now that I have more space than I can possibly think to do with.

Maybe we're heading inexorably towards the little festival of piles....

In the spirit of Paddy Kavanagh, we could stand on the steaming dungheaps of my piles and recite potery...

Like Paddy.. I'll have to find ways to avoid the haulin' and draggin' that goes on in the stony grey soil of the Eastern Shore so I can write potery.

Or maybe my piles are a little Song of Myself for the New World...

Addendum:

I just mentioned my piles post to Himself and he was horrified that I had forgotten our gravel pile. A previous owner had a child who had cancer, who had a playground built for them by the Make a Wish foundation. The toys are all gone, but there's sixty cubic feet of gravel left. Right where the vegetable garden will go.

You don't know despair until you have tried to shovel sixty cubic feet of gravel into a pile.

I hate to work on it, because every time I do I wonder what happened to that child...

We are leaving one corner... for our fire pit.

Also, Himself wants to make it clear that we did not burn the styrofoam, we left it out for the recycling truck.

I had to rescue the neighbour's cat from one of the bags this morning, such was the excruciating smell of squirrel emanating from the bag...

Oh stoney grey gravel of Lawrencetown

The laugh from my love you took

etc etc