How I Changed My Life by Digging Stumps Out of My Yard

When my family and I first moved into our house, I had no idea what it really meant to have a backyard. Financially speaking, it was a bit of an auspicious fluke that we’d been able to buy the place at all. We weren’t the types who hire professional landscapers, and even if we were, we didn’t have a vision for how to sculpt and coif our square of the natural world into any particular image besides one where our daughter could run around and catch fireflies. So for almost ten years, we kept the grassy parts down to a shout with a used mower we bought from a neighbor and that was pretty much it. The borders of the lawn, once marked by previous owners with some flowering ornamental shrubs, had already long since evolved into what I would like to call a thicket, if that word in fact means what it sounds like. An area thick with a tightly enmeshed overgrowth of invasive trees and bushes, most of which I discovered via a plant identification app were buckthorns, Japanese Barberry, Japanese Angelica, and many seemingly innocuous (though actually quite problematic) volunteer mulberry and elm trees, all chaotically bound together with the unbreakable strands of some grape vines that never, ever fruited. <a href="https://medium.com/age-of-empathy/how-i-changed-my-life-by-digging-stumps-out-of-my-yard-d635469c7976">Website</a>