Remember I posted a zillion times about the demon weed from hell?

Well, I finally have it all gone (almost) from the other side of our fence. You know what I discovered? The back alley goes right up to the fence line! We've got this patch of dirt with weeds on it that's three feet wide and easily six or eight inches (edit: definitely not feet!) deep, going from the school right to the end of the back alley (excepting by my fence, because I just cleared it), and all it REALLY is is years worth of composted leaves and detritus! Right on top of the asphalt! Once I toss out the rocks and occasional garbage, and put the awful weeds in the compost (I think I'll leave them to roast in a black garbage bag for a while first), I'm scraping that dirt into a part of the garden where I don't plant things I eat. And here I thought topsoil took a long time to build!

Sadly, this fact didn't make it easier to haul up the weed of hell (which I'm tentatively identifying as some horrific perennial ragweed. It's definitely not goldenrod), as it is coming up right through the roadway. The only parts I could totally be be confident of clearing were those where the erstwhile trees had pushed up enough road that I could just lift chunks up, toss them to the side (hope nobody saw!), and grab the roots underneath.