The Serious Undertaking of the Curbside Plot

So my boyfriend and I have decided to rip up the plot between the sidewalk and the street. Well, it's more like I started to dig and continued, and then he saw me and asked what I was doing... So it's now we. The plot has never done well at all, and we generally neglected it. It just wasn't on our list of things to do, but it just looked sooooo awful all the time. It's an area that's full sun, very hot, and very dry. While digging it out, we soon discovered why nothing grew...

Yep... This rubbish was all inside. An assortment of limestone, cobbles, hardened clumps of dirt, and all sorts. Yucky stuff, and no plant would love it outside of the bermuda grass. After many, many cart fulls of dirt, we managed to get at least 4" removed in about 8 hours over the course of 2 days. It's now in the backyard. Yay.

During the process, we managed to wreck our old cheapo mailbox post which sucked. Fortunately, we were able to come up with a plan, or rather I came up with a plan and had my boyfriend help out. We'd chopped down a couple cedar trees (or rather my boyfriend chopped down a couple cedar trees) because the backyard has an overabundance of trees and they're crowding each other out. The two cedars we chopped down were the first of 3 thus far, and there will be more to come.

Anyway, we still had the trunks of the cedar trees and still weren't sure what to do with them. As it happens, they're about the right size for a mailbox post. So my boyfriend chopped it down to size, and I dug about 2 more feet down. We shoved it in the ground, firmed up the soil around it, and voila! a new mailbox post for free that looks rustic and lovely!

Unfortunately, the mailbox looks ridiculous, so a new mailbox is the next thing on the list. I've been looking for a log cabin or barn mailbox, but they're either very expensive or horribly kitsch which means we'll be making one ourselves.



The cedar really is lovely looking.