Working On The Compost Area and Treeline

Good morning,friends! 

Yesterday,Rick and I got outside for a few hours and continued working on the compost/treeline area. Our goal is to clean it all up,regain some property,and organize our compost area by building bins. Since we bought the house in 2003,we have never done anything with this area,for the most part. Pallets,used lumber,etc found their way into this part of our yard and it looked awful. It's been a sore point with me for quite awhile. I mentioned to Rick last month that I wanted to build bins for our compost using whatever pallets and wood were still good in that mess. Whatever was bad,we could burn or chip.

As you saw in a couple posts back,we started working first on the compost area. There were quite a few sticks and saplings in the pile that we had to separate from the pile:

98% of this pile was taken from the compost area. Any big sticks from the treeline got put in this pile was well. It would be great to have bonfire,but right now things are so dry here that we have had red flag warnings for almost a week now,and no fire permits are being issued.

This is what the compost area looked like the last time I posted about it,remember?

Still had quite a pile to sort through.Put the soil in one pile,the leaves,etc in another. This is what it looked like as of yesterday:

After we got the pile situated,Rick back dragged the area and I did a bit of raking further back towards the trees. (You can see the neighbors property that I was discussing yesterday.In the summer,the leaves hide a good deal of this view). It's in this spot that we are going to build our compost bins.

Now that we have our piles separated,we had to pull out the pallets and the wood from their areas. Rick worked on that some this week.Once the pallets were pulled out,he once again back-dragged the area,and I raked it out,putting sticks in the stick pile,and putting any trash in the trash bag. Apparently at some point,someone used this area as a dumping ground,because we have found paper trash,an Elmo,and an old metal coil box-spring that had a small tree growing around it-all this was under the dirt. Rick even found an old fire ring,still intact! All kinds of "fun" treats.

Rick getting the tractor going.You can see the soil pile to the right and the leaf,etc pile to the left:

I didn't get a photo of the area before the pallets were cleaned out,but this where they were. More back dragging and raking ensued. We then called it a day.

Here are the pallets that Rick pulled out. Any good ones we will use to build the compost bins. The broken ones we will burn,whenever we can burn again:

There are some saplings that we are going to cut,but we are going to make sure we maintain a privacy line.

Have fabulous day on this fabulous planet!