Ditch

I undertook a huge landscaping job in September. It took me the whole month to do it. I'm actually still not 100% done with it. 

We have a ditch that runs between my backyard and the neighbor's. It's the neighborhood water run off. The unfortunate part about it is that the actual drain for all the water to flow into is in my other neighbor's yard. So whenever it rains, all the water sits on top of our grass and eventually crosses our entire back yard to empty into the neighbor's drain. The ground is mostly clay so the water doesn't soak into the ground. Basically, when it rains I have lake front property. 

So my yard doesn't erode away around the ditch, I let all kinds of weeds and crap grow in the ditch. Tall, controlled weeds with deep roots to keep all the land together. It didn't look bad. At least, I didn't think so. But my neighbors whom I share the ditch with apparently thought it was an eyesore through their privacy fence that they can't see the ditch through. So they went out there and hacked it all down and killed everything. 

Now its an eyesore. So I undertook the job of ripping out all the weeds, vines, tree stumps and bullshit from the root to clear the entire ditch. Just pulling the weeds took me three weeks. The rest of the time I've spent rearranging the rocks in the ditch so they do their job. They were strewn around all willy-nilly in the ditch before and were not doing anything at all. Now they help filter the water coming off the street. 

I basically reinvented the functionality of the ditch. I made it a lot smaller by consolidating the rocks. I laid grass seed. I still have a lot of work to do-- more rocks need to be moved and I need to acquire some rocks as well. Next spring I will need to saturate the rocks and nearby land with Round Up 365 to keep it from growing weeds again. The rest of it should become grass and we will be able to mow it like the rest of the yard.

And when the frenchie keeping in fence goes up, my backyard will look like it should have the whole time we lived here but were too broke or lazy to do it.