Yard work makes me cry

A long time ago I ordered way too much soil for the first iteration of vegetable beds. Then I dug the rain garden and removed a ton of soil. Then Greg removed a lot of soil to resod the grass when we moved the vegetable beds. All of the soil from these projects ended up here.

The grass grew up and over it, the bamboo invaded it, the neighboring cats used it as a toilet, and all the weeds that ever were took up residence here. There's about two cubic yards there.

A show of hands: is anyone having the worst allergies of their lives? I am. I have never been so miserable. I spent Saturday night unable to sleep because I couldn't stop sneezing and I couldn't breathe. So I was operating on about four hours of sleep and I felt crummy when I decided that we should get rid of the pile.

I started digging and filling up the truck. I got really frustrated and tired and then I started crying! I swear I don't normally do that. Greg was like, "Okay, wackadoo," and took over. I am the worst.

We took two loads over to Wood Waste Management, who has the most genius business model. We pay them to take our dirt, then they mix it with compost and sand and sell it back to people as "soil mixture." But I'm happy they exist and our soil didn't end up in a landfill. And now our area looks like this.

Next up I want to dig up that bamboo and put it in a container, as it is very badly behaved. And sadly I think the Pieris is going to have to go. Greg and I were planning and drawing and plotting the future deck and pathways and we just don't see how it fits in. I will probably shed some tears when we remove it because that's apparently what I do now.

I'm apparently worse at math than I thought.

Filling the smaller, lower section of the vegetable bed took about two cubic yards of soil.

I assumed it would take about four yards to fill the larger, taller part.  I also wanted to build a hillock in a section of the yard, so I estimated about five yards of soil.

Oh man, that's a LOT of soil.  Like, a crazy amount of soil.

It's way way way too much soil.

I got the second part of the bed filled and had barely made a dent in the pile.  So I started digging out the grass from the area where I wanted the hillock.  My neighbors were concurrently using a sod cutter to do the exact same thing in their yard.  I felt like a sucker, doing it by hand, until they encountered problems five minutes in and spent half the day trying to get the machine to work.

I had it all cleared before they finally gave up on the machine.

Then I started piling soil where the yard sloped dramatically back toward the fence.  I decided to embrace this dip and just designate the dipping area as a mulch zone.  Trying to mow the lawn in this area caused the lawnmower to accelerate dramatically down the hill toward the fence.  It looked bad and it was frankly dangerous.  I'm accident prone and I was probably close to losing a toe.

I grabbed some extra ferns and bleeding hearts I had lying around and put them in, along with the flowering currant and ocean spray I bought for this spot.

I picked up a hosta and a Little Honey oakleaf hydrangea for this dry, shady area.  I think I'm going to move the hydrangea over to the right a bit and plant some foxglove, wild ginger, and maybe an akebia (a vining plant that smells like chocolate!) to twine up the fence. 

I need to get some color over here, yes?  And then I want to put in a bench so people can canoodle in this corner of the yard.  And then I think I'm going to replace the no-privacy fence.  Because I have the fever.  The fever for spending more time and money on my yard.