I am once again doing some yard work around the house. We have done a lot in the almost three years we have been here, but when you start from probably a half an acre of bare dirt, it takes a while to get everything the way you want it, unless you have won the lottery and can hire a landscaping firm. We haven’t, so we can’t.

I put some plywood sides on my 5×10 trailer so I could load it up with topsoil. It comfortably held about three and a little more scoops, each of which is supposed to be around a cubic yard. The landscape company loads with a tractor. I unload with a shovel. Here you can see the pile of topsoil to the right of the trailer.

You can also see a little pignut hickory tree which I will remove and replace with a Japanese maple that is supposed to be suitable for full sunlight. The bare area will be planted with zoysia, like the front yard, which is to the left of where I’m parked. There is a pine stump to the right of the little hickory. It’s from a dead pine I cut last year. I dug around it and cut some of the bigger roots with my axe, then I chained the stump to my truck and jerked it out of the ground. I have to do the same to two, or possibly three, other pine stumps in this area.

I’m going to spread some of the topsoil over the bare dirt here and in a similar-sized section on the other side of the driveway. Then I’ll till it in and plant zoysia, as I did on the two sections of our front yard.

I also plan to use some of the topsoil to plant another maple next to the house. This is looking across the site of the second maple planting towards my truck and trailer. The gray blocks will be a low retaining wall to level the area where the tree will go.

Some of our bulbs have flowered and some are just beginning to flower. The lillies towards the back of the flower bed have impressive orange blooms. The yellow plants are abelia (I think) and the red plants are barberry (I think). The Japanese maples are skinny stalks that we hope spread their limbs and grow. Japanese maples are slow growers, so we know it’s going to take a while.

I also plan to spread some topsoil around the lower section of our front yard, where I worked a good part of last summer trying to prepare for grass planting. That did not go well, and we ended up with only about 50 percent coverage of zoysia, with a lot of undesirable grass spread through it. When I mow this area, the patchy grass and sections of eroded, bare dirt make for a rough and bumpy ride across a fairly steep slope. Every time the mower bumps, it wants to slip downhill, so I have to angle the mower uphill to maintain a straight line.

I unloaded the trailer Tuesday afternoon. Then I had to run the mower over the lower front part of our yard to try to discourage the weedy volunteer grass so the zoysia I planted can get more established. Then I had to run the mower down both sides of Lavender Trail in front of our house. Our land looks uninhabited from the road; you can just catch a glimpse of the house if you look carefully. If I don’t mow the grass along the road it looks pretty bad. Mowing makes it look more like someone lives here.

Everything was good as I worked. It was cool for this time of year, not even 70F, and the humidity was unusually low for May in Georgia. The mower is self propelled, but I still have to push it. But the weather was so nice I didn’t end up soaked in sweat. I put the mower away, walked over to the steps into the house and sat down to take off my boots. That’s when the stabbing pains in my knees started. That’s the new normal for me and my knees. Once I’m sitting down, my knees don’t hurt. If I sit more than about 20 minutes and then stand, my knees hurt. If I walk for 20 minutes, or two hours as I did Tuesday, my knees hurt when I sit down. Some day I’m going to have to do something about that.