Back to Rootchopping

My retirement plan is simple: ride 30 miles and do one adult thing every day. Sometimes not so much. The first week of October included only 38 miles of riding. One trip was 7 1/2 miles from an auto body shop to home. My parked Accord was no match for my neighbor’s pathetic three-point-turning skills and his humongous pick up truck. The second ride was a mental-health 30-miler on Big Nellie through the neighborhoods near home.

The rest of the first week of October involved a four-day trip to New England. We visited my daughter in her new digs in southeastern Connecticut and attended a wedding on the north shore of Massachusetts.

We spent about 25 hours in the car along the oh so relaxing I-95 car sewer. Thankfully, my wife handled the passages through New York City or I’d be in the nervous hospital today. By the time we arrived back home, both my head and my back were wrecked.

What better time than to return to work on the yard project from hell. About a month ago, a tree service took down a maple tree in our front yard. The tree was in bad shape at the start of the summer and a series of week-long heat waves and a nest of carpenter ants did it in. In addition to felling the tree, the tree dudes ground the stump and cleared out some small privet trees, bushes, and vines clogging a perimeter garden in our back yard.

For several days in September I excavated the mulch from the stump and moved it to my backyard. Then I bought twenty bags of dirt from a home center and spread it where the mulch had been. I planted grass seed and watered it religiously. Alas, the grass seed I bought was apparently of the atheist variety of fescue and barely grew.

Turning my talents to the perimeter garden I cleared out a bunch of surface vines and began removing some small stumps. Four stumps came right out of the ground with some persuasion from a spade. A fifth stump took a bit more convincing, and about three hours of work.

Just before leaving for New England I started working on the biggest stump which was oh so conveniently situated next to my neighbor’s chain link fence. I spent about four or five hours digging and hacking and digging and hacking to no avail.

After returning from New England I returned to the stump. With more digging and hacking, I discovered that the roots of the stump were intertwined with some massive tree roots and dozens of fist sized rocks. Oh joy.

Dig. Hack. Dig. Hack.

It would not budge.

Yesterday, I found a nasty looking four-foot crowbar in the basement and brought that to the task. Within 30 minutes the stump surrendered. Halleluiah.

The only problem now was that the root ball was two feet down in a hole and weighed about 50 pounds. My efforts had left my back a complete mess so lifting the beast out of the hole was out of the question. I spent another half hour using a small shovel to knock rocks and clay out of the root ball. Once relieved of its anchors, the root ball agreed to come out of the hole.

Now that the stump was gone, I had to shovel all the excavated dirt back into the hole. Ugh.

After I hauled my nemesis away, I found that I could not stand up straight. All the digging and yanking and prying and lifting and shoveling did not agree with my lumbar stenosis. Imagine that! I was bent at the waist rather painfully and involuntarily. I was a hurtin’ unit.

I rested a bit and decided that I might as well apply my crippled body to another small stump along the fence. I am a gardening genius.

I was expecting my shovel to pop this one out of the ground in no time. The stump had other ideas. Another struggle ensued but thankfully this one lasted only another hour.

It was a three Advil evening.

I have some more vines and very small shovel-worthy stumps to work on tomorrow. Then I’ll take all that maple mulch and spread it over the garden in the hopes of suffocating any opportunistic weeds.

Take that mother nature.

And after all this, I will garden no more forever.