Back Yard Clean Up

One of the fun things about owning a house is finding out what the previous owners did...  Or didn't do.  In this case, there's a wedge of property above the driveway that is super overgrown.  I never got around to dealing with it last year, because my priority was dealing with all the stuff that is readily visible from the front of the house.

I'm pretty sure the previous owners thought the same, because when I went into this little chunk of property, it was more overgrown than I could have possibly imagined.  The pine trees were all dense and dying and there was thick brush covering the ground.  It was so dense that pine needles weren't even hitting the ground.  So Emma and I ripped all that junk out of there over the course of a couple weekends.  And then, because I'm lazy and didn't want to haul the brush off, I had a couple bonfires.  The kids loved watching, although Zephyr managed to burn himself twice by grabbing hot rocks.  Anyway, the fire was so hot that it stayed in coals for about a week despite the drizzle we got the day after I burned.