Month: September 2018

Three out of ten but shows improvement…

Sick of all the weeds we decided to try and put the garden to grass before winter comes. We’ll probably end up digging some of this up for walls, paths, flower beds etc. but all that will probably be years off. This is what we’ve been working on mostly for the past few weeks.

The process started off by getting rid of all the weeds and vines which was a combination of digging, weed killer and flame thrower (think big bunsen burner).

We don’t know how we will want the garden but we thought that having nice flowing contours would be a good start and the first step to doing that is to roughly grade the garden which involves using the soils from humps to fill the dips.

It’s hard work as we have many tons of soil to move which involves shovels and a wheelbarrow. I’d say we are maybe half way there and this is just to the rough grading stage, the fine grading will be another pretty big task. By the end of this I estimate that we will have moved about twenty tons of soil.

So that I could look at our progress when we took a break, I took off the side railing of our rear deck. The whole thing is going anyway and it’s nice to be able to sit back and take stock of the work.

If you look at the string you can see a curve in it and this is the hump we are removing. These photos were taken after maybe three weekends of shoveling and wheelbarrowing and yes it really doesn’t look that different. To cheer us up I added two pictures of what the garden looked like when we bought it.

Last night we met someone who owns a tool hire business in Kingston and we will probably get some heavy duty machinery to finish off the rough grading. This is the earth moving machine we are looking at and we may be able to hire it for a weekend for a few hundred dollars. I bet we can do a lot in one weekend with one of these.

It will be handy to try out something like this as we have to dig out and replace our 130 year cast iron water waste pipe at some point.

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In preparation for the builders we moved all the blue stone slabs from both sides of the house and took them to the back of the plot. The very, very small ones I could lift but the largest were monsters. The biggest one we moved was roughly 48″ x 18″ x 6″ and as bluestone weights 162.5 lbs. a cubic foot that stone could have been around 485lbs.

We moved them on a sack truck and I added a third wheel and had the truck lying horizontally to spread the weight. It still flattened the pneumatic tires so we had to pump them up nice and hard. It wasn’t fun moving them and a few choice words were uttered during the process. We won’t be moving those for a while.

We still have the biggest to move (last photo) which we’ll do after the O+ festival.

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As I mentioned in an earlier post, most work on house is on hold until we get roof and foundations fixed, hence our work on the garden. Our latest plan is to put everything to grass. We may build walls and paths through all of this later but at least we can see what is growing (i.e. poison ivy) and mowing is easier than weeding.

We started off with digging up the worst part of vines using our trusty Hoss Fork (it’s a beast of a fork but I would have liked slightly deeper tongs). After a couple of days I soon got tired of that so we got rid of the rest with weed killer and a flame thrower (think big bunsen burner). The burner is a lot of fun but Aimee finds it a bit scary.

We have probably had about 8 bonfires over the last couple of weekends which will have saved us at least one dumpster/skip. The morning after a bonfire the embers are usually still glowing so it’s easy to get stared again. All the fence went on the fire 🙂 We did keep the fires reasonably small so we wouldn’t annoy the neighbours.

Progress has been pretty slow as it’s been humid and in the low 90’s (32C) and it drains you really quickly. Next we want to grade the land as it has bumps and dips etc so it will be a lot of digging and wheel-barrowing and then we will have to put a tiller through it all so lots more work.

We did dig up another concrete path at the side of the house so we’ll be looking to getting another skip soon – carrying that stuff was hard.

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Some of these pics were taken early in the year, hence the lack of green.