What do you do when the temperature reaches 15°C (59°F) on an old year’s day? You rush to work in the yard, of course. 

We have had a really cold period during the past couple of months, and together with a very dry summer, it delayed all of the planned work, so the warm wave that came to us a couple of days ago was more than welcome. Temperature is more like the late spring, and after a nice rain, the soil is now ready to work. And, boy do we have lots of things to do.

Past 20 years our yard has been a working area with lots of sheds, storage areas, and animal houses. There was a big wooden work shed, old chicken coop, bunny coop, and a tool shed. During the 20 years of constant use, these buildings became an old and unpleasant view in the yard. Since my dad has been sick for years now, there was nobody to help me around, and we started abandoning the buildings. Also, because of the skyrocketing prices, we stopped having chickens and bunnies, and all the buildings were starting to collapse. 

So last spring my hubby and I decided to take down all of the buildings, except the garage, move the workshed to one of the basements, finally fix the abandoned area, and make it into a decent garden space. 

During the summer my hubby took down all the buildings, which was lots of hard work, and by the end of the summer, we were left with lots of concrete, wooden debris, and lots of scrap iron.

Now, it was time to start fixing the area, but due to the weather, this was on hold until this Wednesday. We decided to use the sunny days to do as much work as we could.

The plan is to leave the concrete terrace intact, we’ll add some wooden containers and frames around it to be able to plant flowers and we’ll use the terrace for seating and relaxing.

The wooden foundations that were once home to the bunny coop will be fixed, since now they are half-rotten, the surface will be covered with fine gravel and we’ll here make a place for potted plants and a room for a removable swimming pool. If the years will be cooler, we’ll place here our chili pepper, cabbages, and flower pots and if the years will be like the last one, we can always move the pots and install the pool quickly and easily.

The biggest issue was the area that was before the chicken coop. The floor was covered with concrete slab, and since the whole coop was on a downhill area, there’s not much use for this concrete. The initial plan was to build a couple of raised beds, but after calculating the amount of wood needed to do this, we gave up on this idea. The price of wood here is enormous, wood boards are more expensive than bricks and concrete, so we decided against building the raised beds. Due to the concrete on the floor, the raised beds would need to be at least 80cm (31in) high, and that’s just too much wood considering the size of the area. 

The one thing we noticed while cleaning the area was that the soil here was actually really good, years of not using it have kept it in decent condition, and after digging out the bricks we noticed that it was full of worms and that gave us another option. We decided to smash the concrete slab, and that’s what we’ve been doing the whole old year’s day. 

The concrete slab was poured on top of a thick layer of big stones, so the job was really hard. Hubby tried to smash it with a demolition hammer drill, but the job was just taking too much work and effort. We were going nowhere. So, he ended up drilling holes all around the concrete, and then he smashed it with a huge mallet, while I used the crowbar to pry the stones off and remove them. 

Things were moving much faster this way, and we managed to remove the whole concrete in one day. We left a small part of the concrete intact for a small pathway, but the rest was broken and removed, so now we have a nice and clean garden area and my new vegetable garden.

But, the job is not done here, now we need to make a small frame around the new garden, add some compost on top of this soil, and make new steps next to the new areas. The old steps were made by me 15 years ago, and due to the heavy use, downhill position, and weather conditions, most of them cracked or slipped down the hill. Hubby will now make wooden frames for steps from the scrap wood and we’ll fill them with all the junk concrete and bricks that we have. After filling them we’ll cover them with small gravel to ensure that they don’t become slippery during the winter. We could just pour some concrete on top of the steps, but concrete on the downhill stairs is like having a ski slope. Something we don’t want here. 

Once we finish everything, we should have a new terrace, pool area, a small vegetable garden, and new yard steps and since there’s a saying in Croatian that roughly translates as: “what you do on old years day you’ll be doing the whole next year”, there will be lots more of stone smashing, brick raking and soil digging next year. 

Happy New year everyone!!