time to play b sides: Manual Labor is fun

We recently had all our trees removed, including this poplar tree.

We waited until it was really ugly to have it taken out:

It was nice for shade and privacy, but the roots were getting into the garden:

And under the house:

Meanwhile, the ex-living-xmas-tree in the front yard:

was eating the sprinkler system:

It took months and finally it took friends of friends since grade school to get someone to give a decent quote and then return our phone calls for scheduling.

We paid them an extra couple hundred bucks to dig some trenches for irrigation.

We have been excavating large poplar roots from the remaining cement-like dirt and boulder combo, using a 20 pound digging bar, a shovel, and my fingernails.

In the picture above, the top shows the width of the trenches they dug. For the bottom part, we widened their trench until we got to the cement patio.

We were already digging out the root system below, when we gave up on the garden because of the need to have the trees out. We were really tired of pulling happy poplar roots out of the garden every year, after initially digging out all the rocks, and putting in real dirt.