With some roofing projects, it's common to leave the old shingles on the building, then put the new shingles on top of the old ones. Ernie's roofers took a different approach, taking off the shingles and tar paper down to the bare wood, which is a much better way to do it. What wasn't so much better was that, when the shingles came off the roof, they landed on top of our sweet corn.
Fact is, we've never had much luck with sweet corn, so we took the devastation with some measure of stoicism. When Mrs. Ernie came around to apologize, we realized that it was too late to salvage to salvage the corn crop that year, and there was no point in making anybody feel any worse about things than they did already. So, we said, "Tell you what: instead of putting the shingles into the trash, let me have them and we'll call it even." She agreed, and that afternoon we had several boxes of the stuff lined up along the fence.
Our plan was to lay down landscape fabric between the raised beds, then cover them with the broken fragments of the shingles. This was about two years ago, and the installation seems to have held up pretty well. We would have liked to have had pea gravel, or cocoa shell mulch, or something a little more decorative, but the theme around here is "go with what you've got" and what we got was a bunch of used shingles. Our guess is they'll last for years.
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