When I think back to our early years on the farm, I feel like we were always cleaning up. Of course, there was the house itself and all the stuff that we emptied out of it. But outside was the bigger clean up. There were plants and trees and piles of dirt and rubble and rocks. So, so many rocks.

Here we are 11 1/2 years later, and we’re still cleaning up.

This fall I tackled two areas that have been untouched since we moved in.

Beside the barn there was a mysterious mound. I figured it was rocks, but it was so covered in weeds I couldn’t tell. And hacking through well-established weed roots is not a fun job. So last year I tarped it. I love using tarps to clean up weedy sections. This fall I finally pulled the tarp off. The dead weeds easily raked off the mound, and I was able to dig in. The mound turned out to be mostly dirt, with just a few rocks. So I spread the top soil around to fill in some low spots and added the rocks to our rock pile.

The tarp had been weighted with old tires (since we have such a stash). I decided rather than finding somewhere to stack the tires, I was finally going to deal with them (and some others that have been hanging around too long). So I loaded 6 into my car (all I could fit) and took them to the recycling station. I have about 12 more to go, but it feels good to be getting rid of them finally.

I relocated the tarp to another mound near the old coop. I was able to mow some of this section and trim down a stump that Matt’s Dad had cut for me before we demoed the coop. The mound looks like mostly concrete rubble, but again it is overgrown and hard to hack through. So the tarp is going to work again, and hopefully next spring we can level this out and mow through.

(This time the tarp is weighted with lumber from the old coop that I’m going to try to reuse. The lumber had been stacked behind the barn and was well-tangled in grass, so picking it up was another clean-up. Though this time the mess was my own.)

The final clean up goes to our farmer. I’ve continued to pick away at our last junk area every so often this year. We’ve made a lot of progress and tidied things up considerably. But one of the things I uncovered was an old wire fence overgrown with vines. The fence posts were still firmly in the ground. So our farmer came by with his bigger machine and pulled the posts out for us. Now I have another clear section that I can mow through.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe how much we still have to do. How can we have been here 11 years and still be cleaning up? I know some of it is the reality of a farm where things get dumped, piled and stashed. It is also the reality of time, energy and attention. I also know everything we do is a step forward. I have six less tires, one less mound and one less fence to deal with.

Are you doing any clean-up at your house? Do you have an piles on your property? Have you ever used tarps to kill weeds? What is your never-ending project?