I am no longer stumped

On Sunday the clouds cleared away as the sun came up. The morning warmed up a bit and we were able to get a little work done in the yard before lunch. Ken did some weeding in the potato patch, and I worked on an old stump with a pick-axe.

June 2007. We put our rain gauge in a flower pot in an attempt to make the stump useful.

The stump was left from the linden tree we had cut down in 2003. We've wanted to be rid of it for a while as it's right where we'd like to put some lawn furniture in the summer. But inertia is a powerful force and we had other priorities and just never got it together to deal with it. It's been slowly rotting for six years, but it wasn't until last summer that we tried to level the ground around it. Nothing doing. There were still stubborn bits of the stump that wouldn't yield.

May 2010. Ready for seed. And we need to clean out the bed around the well. The smaller bare patches in the grass are the remains of last winter's mole city.

So this year we built a fire on top of the stump and burned it away. A few swings of the pick-axe was all it took to be rid of the rest. Ken ran the rototiller around to level the ground. I raked it smooth and now we're ready for grass seed. There's another stump a little further out in the yard from and old pine tree that came down. We'll deal with that one next. Check back in six years.