The Severed Cortex

Because I'd be a giant hypocrite if I did.

We've been working our ass off to get the yard looking nice, and by god it looks nice. I'd even argue that we've got the nicest yard in the subdivision, not that it's a competition. It isn't, right? Well, if it is, we are clearly the winners.

Don't believe me? Judge for yourself.

We half-assed the mulch thing last year because of the need to get some trees removed. No sense in putting in a bunch of work if the tree guys were going to goof it all up, but when the tree guys didn't show up all summer and we called someone else to cut them down, the point of putting down mulch was completely moot. Normally it takes 5 yards of mulch per year. I estimated it would take seven or maybe eight this year. It took eight and I could find a use for a ninth if I was so inclined. Right now I'm not inclined. Robert helped with two of these as did Nancy, but the other four I did by myself.

And then Nancy pointed out that the mulch near the woods would be blocking the water draining from the low spot in the yard. Hard to tell from this pic, but you can kind of tell where it's lower next to the woods.

So I had to build a drainage system. As you can imagine, the engineer in me loved doing this, but I needed rock for the drainage pipe. Oh well, we needed to touch up some of the landscape rock anyway so I got about a 1/3 yard of pea gravel and a 1/3 yard of larger rock too and shoveled that out of the truck.

I think my drain looks awesomely professional and it works great.

Too great. If you look closely, you can see my now channeled water is cutting a swath through my neighbor's yard due to the heavy rainstorms.

I may need to build a water diverter or perhaps an aqueduct system.