Garden Clean-up

The first three weekends were all spent focusing on the garden. Or the jungle / dump that was the sidelot and the back of the building…

Our property is truly unique for a city home. The house sits on a standard Chicago lot 125x25 feet, and we are lucky enough to own the adjacent lot which is the exact dimensions. The ideas for community garden, Kubb playing fields, and hammock setups are endless!

So with the help from various family members and part of the Swedish community we got cleaning the yard, something that hadn’t been done in the two previous decades more than a handful of times. We were able to bag up close to 40 bags of yard waste-branches, bushes, weed, grass for city composting. And we now have firewood for our improvised fire pit for at least a few years!

In addition, we found a little bit of everything while removing the weed. Everything from your ordinary glass pieces, plastic junk and other garbage, to a bathtub, car tires, utility sinks and a wheelbarrow full with concrete. The most interesting we found though were two machetes, which we now have had cleaned and sharpened. One is particularly beautiful, with the blade having artistic imprints of lions and other animals, as well as an ocean. So that one might end up on the wall somewhere inside the building in the future! One of them was from Brazil and the other one from Colombia.

All our neighbors we have met have all commented on how they have never seen the yard this “empty”, and how different it looks… We are trying to keep it that way but we’ve already filled another round of two bags with new growth weed that we cut down. Gives us a glimpse of the future yard work we have cut out for us.