...new sod!
Hallelujah and whoopdedoo, the back yard is a dust
bowl no longer. Last weekend J. our intrepid and energetic nephew Joey
helped us resod the back yard. For those who have never experienced it,
laying sod is a trip...mostly a slimey one. To see how the yard got in
this pitiable condition, see my previous blog entry about the floods in
Dec '04 and Jan. '05.
Before you start sodding the sodding yard
(heh, couldn't resist), you have to clear the entire yard of anything
you can move, then rototill and level the dirt. We mixed in 20 bags of
soil amendment--our local soil makes the dirt on Mars seem like prime
bottom land. The chickens, of course, were in Heaven. Joey looked at
me like I was a little nuts when I told him that one of his jobs would
be to shoo the chickens out of the rototillers' patch using a broom.
Actually it took both him AND me to keep them away. Chickens don't know
from self-preservation when there is primo food like earthworms
involved. J. & Joey used some spare 4x4 fence posts to help level
the dirt and I walked the yard picking up more of the ever-popular
broken glass, bits of rusty metal and old marbles. Among the things
found was a vintage steel Budweiser bottle cap, surprisingly in pretty
darned good condition.
Much to our delight the temperature was
nearing 100 degrees the two days we had picked out to work in the yard.
The minute the sod is delivered the clock starts ticking, you've only
got a matter of hours to get it laid as it cheerfully begins dying the
minute the sod company cuts it out of the ground. I mostly hosed down
the three pallets of sod and the sections that were laid, while J. &
Joey leveled, rolled the ground, laid sod chunks and afterwards rolled
the sod again.
The chickens very nearly wept with delight at
the sight of all that grass, and in order to keep the pallets of sod
from being nibbled to death we decided to sacrifice one strip towards
the greater good. Here they are, only about two-thirds of the flock
fell on it like wolves...the ducks just wanted to sit on it and bask in
the grassyness of it all, and Geraldine the tortoise barged in and ate
as if the chickens didn't even exist.
This picture shows the three pallets of sod, surrounded by worshipping fowl.
Sod
is apparantly grown in dirt mixed with snot....to say that it's slimey
stuff is understating it. To make matters worse I had to keep hosing it
down so that the damned stuff wouldn't DIE, so that made for slimey
snotty dirt to ice skate on while trying to carry chunks of heavy sod.
Try it sometime, it's loads of laughs when you are exhausted and it's
100 degrees. At one point Joey, while watching me hose off the pallets,
ventured sadly, "That only makes it heavier..." "I know..." I
apologized.
Here is the yard, rototilled (which, to everyone's
further joy, makes it like wading through 12 inches of fresh snow). The
stuff piled in the back is the pool, N.'s slide, lawn chairs, etc.
This
next picture shows Day 2 of the Damned Sod, as it came to be known by
then. The chickens were running around in a rather Brownian motion-type
frenzy lying on different parts of it, as if they were afraid it would
suddenly disappear as quickly as it had appeared.
Finished,
yay! And none of the sod (except the Sacrificial Chunk) died! I'm so
happy I could cry. I'm still amazed at the amount of incredibly hard
work that J. & Joey did, my heros, thanks guys! :) Here's the
finished yard, I tried to get pics in the same areas that my previous blog entry during the floods show. The difference is astounding.
N.
came home after two days at the Grandparents and her eyes were bugging
out of her head. She eyed the grass every bit as hungrily as the
chickens had and said, "Can I lay on it?!" Afterwards she ran around
yelling "Grass! Grass!"
My thoughts exactly, kid.
