Front edged, really!

It's been time for a month or so to put out my political signs for the November 2012 election.  But I've been stalling with the argument that I really need to make the front yard look nice first.  Where is the benefit of having a sign posted in the crummiest looking yard on the street?

Well finally, I was able to get the front yeard polished this weekend, and up went my signs on Sunday night.  A friend checked them out on Monday afternoon and was quite impressed with the work I had done.  "Chiseled" was her description of my precise edging.

For years, I've quite often had the worst looking front lawn among houses nearby.  Especially when there have been long periods in between mowing.  And then in the early spring when weeds often take over the lawn after the previous years drought.

Mind you, I think I have a nice looking house.  But for anyone walking down the sidewalk...  Well you couldn't actually walk down my section of the sidewalk for much of the time I've owned this home, because it was covered with crabgrass and dirt, sometimes with the crabgrass 3 feet high.

I have some excuses.  For one, my particular position near the bottom of the street means I have more excess rainwater than others.  Rainwater runs over my section of sidewalk in a heavy rain.  The dirt then builds up, and next thing you know (year or so later) it's covered with grass again.  Grass growing in the cracks makes it easy for the dirt to accumulate behind it.

One way I hope to change this dynamic is to seal all the gaps between the concrete blocks with a self-leveling caulk to prevent grass from growing there.  I have now purchased the caulk and the backing rods needed to install it, but we'll see how long it takes me to get around to doing this.

Meanwhile, no more excuses, running out of time before the election, so I got the front yard cleaned up.  I took the unusual step of mowing the front lawn on Wednesday afternoon before going to work.  I had previously mowed about two weeks earlier but the crabgrass in the front section was rising up again.

The weekend was reserved for the task of doing the edging, and doing it better than I have in 19 years of owning this house.  Often I'll do the front edging on one weekend evening, and whatever I get done, that's it.  It was better than not doing it at all, but far from exact.  This time I wanted to get all the grass off of the sidewalk.  Not just from the cracks in the sidewalk, but on the side, to actually cut back the lawn to just past the edge of the sidewalk--and on the other side.

To understand how much work this was, you have to realize the lawn was very nearly covering half of the sidewalk in places.  (And it's been far worse at other times this year.)

Maybe I didn't really do this very efficiently, because on Day One I simply did what I usually do...I whacked as much as I could out of the cracks in one day.  I did a little better (and I think this is very important if you want nice appearance) I cleaned up all the dirt afterwards.  Usually after cleaning the dirt you find more grass that needs to be edged, and I did some of that too.  But on Saturday night, when I packed up at 7:30 PM I had completely swept away everything that was loose.  I usually don't bother to do that.

Then on Sunday, Day Two, I tackled what I usually don't want to think about.  I got rid of all that overgrown grass.  Inch by inch, I jammed a shovel into the grass past the sidewalk, and separated all the grass and dirt on the lawn side from the sidewalk side.  This was very hard work and I had to take breaks after each few feet of progress.  Finally after doing one big section, I took a flat hoe and then pulled all the sidewalk grass away from the lawn and rolled it up like a carpet.  A very heavy carpet that I had to move in several sections.  I then repeated this a bit more.

I also re-did all the edging I had done on Saturday because the cleaning had revealed more stuff that needed work.

And then one final clean, I ultimately filled up my city trashcan and also a secondary trashcan which I'll have to discard next week.  Probably over 100 pounds of debris in all.

For all edging operations, and some of the sweeping, I used my full face respirator, both for impact protection (the edger can throw little stones) and air filtration (the dirty dirt on the sidewalk and street is about as bad as it gets, filled with pollutants from cars and yards).