Unfiltered Story #326593

Back in the spring of 2019, I decided to build a porch in front of my apartment. I removed the hedge in front of my door, removed the cobblestones I put down 8 years prior, leveled out the foundations, laid down wooden beams and then screwed down planks on top. Job done.

As a consequence of this new deck being in place, I also felt that I needed to fix the garden opposite the house: There is a fairly steep grass hill leading down from my door and now that I had built the deck in such a way that it was sticking out from the top of the hill, there was now a gap between the deck and the grass. To get to the lawn, I would have to jump down. I decided to simply fill in that gap by dumping a whole lot of soil outside the deck, thereby raising the whole hill. Then I’d sow grass on top again. Here’s where the story gets good.

When I planned this whole thing, I got this idea that I should use some big wooden logs as filling underneath the soil. I had been collecting these big logs from a nearby forest, and I now placed them on the lawn under the deck and prepared to dump the soil on top. “That’s nice,” I thought. “Now I save some money by needing less soil, and because wood rots, it’s good for the environment in the lawn too.”

I hooked up a borrowed trailer to my car and went to the local landfill. They had a “soil market” where anyone could bring their truck or trailer, buy different types of soil by the ton, and drive home again. I only had the trailer for the weekend, so I’d have to be efficient and get all the soil transportation done in one day.

I went back and forth between my home and the landfill several times, filling up the trailer and dumping the soil on top of the big logs and further down the hill. I just managed to cover up everything and create a nice and smooth surface upon which to sow the new grass. The hill now had a better angle and I wouldn’t have to jump off the deck in order to get down to the lawn.

Then I thought: “Maybe I’ll just do one more trip? Get just one more load of soil before I have to return the trailer?” As it turns out, I couldn’t. The soil market had closed. Not just for the day, but for the season. It was autumn. Of 2019.

Normally, the soil market would open again in the spring, but for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the past couple of years, it didn’t. In fact, it never reopened. When I checked their website in the summer of 2022, there was a notice that said their soil market had shut down permanently.

Good thing I used those logs for filling. If I hadn’t, I would never have been able to get enough soil to finish the job.