The trash pile may be gone, but there was still a small pile of random garbage the previous owners had chucked into that space. It all had to go in to our regular garbage bin, but I managed to fit it in last week. We still have a giant tractor tire and a buried road sign to deal with, but we’ll get to those eventually.
As you can probably guess from the lack of posts, it’s been a busy couple of weeks as we work to manage the large piles of wood chips created when we had the giant trash heap cleared (and the trees trimmed). I’m happy to report though that about 1/8th of the wood chips are now spread in a couple of places around the property and each day I work away at spreading another few cubic feet. Seriously, who needs a gym when you live on a big piece of property?
I started with the areanext to the garage. A large fir tree dominates it and the previous owners had done some extensive landscaping, but there was no sign they ever put down any sort of ground cover. Thus, a lot of exposed bare earth surrounded the plants.
Here is a before shot:
This is what it looked like midway through the spreading.
And here is what it now looks like. Many many wheelbarrows of wood chips were moved to for this image.
This rather smallish section took a bit longer than anticipated as this happened:
Yep that’s right, I managed to break the garden rake. Agent Smith repaired it, but I also went and bought a brand new one.
Most of our tools that we use for such work, like the rake and wheelbarrow, were included in the sale of the house and most are pretty weathered. Still, it was nice to have a lot of useful things ready and waiting for us when we took ownership. Over time many if not all will be replaced, but for now, as long as I wear work gloves when using any of them (nasty splinters otherwise), they’re great.
Here are some extra pics I took. This one shows the dumpster currently on the property for the deck removal that happened today (more on that in another post). Just behind the dumpster there is a small mound. That is the pile of chips I’ve been working to spread out. It’s mainly all walnut and gum tree bits and it was originally 4 times as high as it is now. A vast quantity of the finer mulch from the gum tree is now spread out behind the pile and around the gum, but there is still enough material there to spread across the bare earth towards and then around the fig tree in the foreground. 
Because the pile is not uniform in composition, certain layers are comprised of bigger chips and it’s the large chips I’ve been shifting around with a wheelbarrow. We don’t have pictures of the giant mounds of chips behind the garage uploaded, but here’s a quick shot I took tonight that shows another area where we’ve spread chips. On the near side of the far white fence, all that brown stuff…wood chips. If you know where do you look, you can just make out a couple of the piles we still need to deal with. (They’re blocked from view by the shrubs.)
