That's exactly what happened with my shed, the frame cracked in the first week. 200 bucks sounds cheap but you're basically buying a headache in a box. The guy in Boise probably knew that thing was junk and offloaded it on you. I say scrap it after you salvage any decent wood and just go DIY with some 2x4s and heavy duty tarps from Home Depot. My buddy built one for like 50 bucks and it's still standing after two winters. You'll learn more from fixing your mistakes than from paying for someone else's shoddy work.

Had a friend who swore he'd never watch it cause the opening theme annoyed him. Caught the "pear cider" gag halfway through season 2 and now he's got the full box set on his shelf.

Oh man, I actually read a post about this exact thing on a dredging forum a few months back. A guy from Mississippi was running a clamshell on the Yazoo River and said it turned a two-day job into a four-day nightmare because of the mud. He finally gave up and went back to his wire bucket after losing a whole shift to cleaning out the clamshell jaws every 20 minutes. Sounds like the clamshell just doesn't work on that silty, soupy bottom where you need a good seal to hold the load. Maybe it works better on gravel or harder material, but for mud it seems like a straight downgrade.

I read somewhere that native goldenrod can host up to 100 different insect species.

Right?! The scrunch test blew my mind too. I was just tossing chip bags in there.