The Underground

Today's post will combine a few landscaping adventures from last year with our latest bizarre discovery. Though we never fail to call Miss Utility before any kind of digging, we continue to find a lot of things under our lawn that are definitely beyond the scope of a check. It always leaves me wondering what our yard used to look like before we moved in (going on 12 years now).

I don't even remember how we started finding these problem areas--I think it. was simply because the grass (or even the weeds that we call grass) was not thriving. We started adding compost and churning up the soil, trying to loosen it up to plant new grass, when we realized there was landscaping cloth EVERYWHERE. This wasn't at the edge of our property, where there had perhaps been gardens. This was under so much of our yard. Of course our lawn wasn't growing happily--there was nowhere for the roots to spread out. D spent multiple weekends slowly pulling it out and replacing it with dirt. 

There was no trick that we could figure out for removing it. Just a shovel and a pick and manually trying to pull it up. It came up in giant sheets in some places. We really do think that this entire quarter or so of our back yard, the part that we cleared out seven years ago. I guess it really was a garden at some point, though it was just an overgrown mess by the time we moved in.

By the end, we had quite a lot of landscaping cloth piled up and ready to be trashed. The grass seems happier already (or it would if we hadn't destroyed it while building the patio).

Part two of "what is under the ground" is this giant hole that emerged this past fall. Not a groundhog this time, we think. More likely the finally decaying tree roots leftover from the big tree that fell down a few years ago. It took a lot of dirt and stomping on it to cover it up but it hasn't come back since we took care of it in October. At least this one was easy to deal with.

  

And finally, our latest underground discovery--corrugated pipe that used to be connected to the downspouts. We did a little bit of pipe repair under our patio when it was rebuilt and it was pretty clear that whatever system had been in place previously was clogged/collapsed/non-functional. And lo and behold, as we were gardening, D noticed a sad patch of grass, dug in his shovel and SURPRISE - cheap corrugated pipe! It had utterly collapsed and wasn't connected to anything and was blocking the roots of our grass, so it had to come out. No easy feat, of course. Because we uncovered just about a foot of it at first, but we knew that there was much more.

Much, much, much more.

And then we found even more, elsewhere in the yard. Seriously what is going on under our yard?!

We couldn't get it all out because, in some spots, it went deep enough that we couldn't easily dig it up. But we pulled out easily 30 feet, probably more.

There was another interesting thing that we managed to pull from the ground while doing yard work, but if I say too much, I'll be getting ahead of myself, since I haven't told you about this project yet. So here's a bit of a spoiler for our river rock garden--with the giant steel beam under it. (What the heck was going on in this yard before we moved in? Seriously!)