I think that our friend Daniel Harnish said it best last fall (or rather, signed it best) "Who murdered your backyard?"
Last year, our yard got completely taken over my wild morning glory, or "bind weed". By the time Aaron found out how to effectively poison it (you have to dilute Round-Up, put it into a jar and stick the ends for the morning glory into the jar and let it slowly slowly carry the poison down the 6 foot main root), it had already smothered our grass to death.
This is actually a picture of what was left of the morning glory this year. It started to come back in the raised garden area so Aaron had to kill it all over again.
So Aaron raked it all up and by fall, our backyard looked like a brown prickly muddy mess.
Fast forward to this summer. Aaron was going to rip it all out in the spring but instead we had a surprise baby that we hadn't planned on last summer/fall when we made our plans.
Our backyard got taken over by a new binding vine called "knot weed". Aaron had to, once again poison the whole backyard and try and rip out all of the dead growth. And since we had to rip out all that dead growth and start from scratch anyway, we decided to till up everything and just lay down new sod and give this backyard a completely fresh chance.
Aaron finally started tilling up this mess at the beginning of September when I borrowed a tiller from some friends at our church.
While he was tilling, he ran into these obstacles...
...and decided that while he was ripping stuff up, he might as well rip them out as well. They are old laundry posts that we used when we first moved in and we didn't have a dryer...but it's been 4 years since we hooked up the dryer and stopped using these....so it was time to say good bye.
Aaron backed up my Montero and got some rope.
And it was trial and error back there for the next two weeks.
Aaron decided while my dad and brother were over (on my brother's way back to BYU-I), we would try and get more tilling done in the backyard.
My dad went out to inspect how dig Aaron had dug around the pole and how deep the cement went and how tough our rope was.
My dad confirmed again that the rope was not going to be good enough and we were going to need some chains. Aaron knew this and again lamented that we didn't have any...while I reminded him that we had friends who did, who would be able to lend them to us.
It was all tragically hopeless.
Oh wait...no. It wasn't. I called up a friend with chains and a friend to help be some added muscle to the project and a couple hours later....
Aaron and our friend, pounded all of the cement off of the poles. They were cemented down about 3 feet...which is kind of absurd. What kind of laundry were they expecting these to hold? This isn't tornado country.
Now we just have a big dead dead backyard.
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