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yard, part 4:
landscaping
giving our yard breast implants and botox
injections
Our poor, neglected yard.
With all that we'd been doing on the inside of the house, we just didn't
have time to deal with the outside. Sure, we've accomplished some big
things out there -- digging out the back
yard, putting up a gazillion retaining
walls, and putting down a veritable
mountain of gravel -- but there were still big piles of dirt all over
the place, stacks of bricks and other detritus the PO left all over the
damn yard, and the weeds...well, they'd declared victory and instituted a
military dictatorship over the rest of the plants.
You thought we were
exaggerating, didn't you? Notice how there aren't any landmarks, so you
can figure out what part of the yard the picture is from? It was like a
jungle expedition back there -- blink and something big and slithery was
liable to snatch you for its lunch.
Once
the house was painted, we suddenly
felt the burn to get the yard whipped into shape. We had a goal to push
hard the work we wanted done by the end of June, so that we'd have the
rest of the summer to enjoy it and hopefully avoid most of the heat. Our
goal? To get all the dirt piles spread around, the garden beds installed
and planted, the remaining gravel spread, the last of the retaining wall
stones used up, the entire yard covered with newspaper (for weed barrier),
and then everything barkdusted like mad.
Before we could do
anything else, we needed to deal with those infernal dirt piles. What dirt
piles, you ask? Why the dirt piles left over from
the Big Dig. See, even though we'd
reshaped the entire back slope, built up a planting bed along the back
fence, and created a big "outcropping" in the southeast corner where a shed
will eventually go, we still had lots and lots and lots of dirt piled
along the southern side of the house, the only place we had to put it. And
that's also the only place to put the two raised garden beds we wanted,
which meant all of that dirt needed to be moved. Again.
So, we started building up
berms along the southern property line, and shaping the back slopes some
more, and building up the beds along the front and side of the house. But
all of those places could only take so much dirt and as I said, we still
had LOTS of it. The front yard was a good candidate, but of course it
already held two large piles of leftover gravel that were to be used for
the area around the garden beds. In other words, in order to move the dirt
so we could build our garden beds we needed to move the gravel where the
majority of the dirt was going to go but the gravel needed to go around
the garden beds and AAAAGGGHHH IT'S A MOBIUS STRIP OF SUCKTACULARNESS!
We started digging down
through the pile where the garden bed walls would go, kind of sculpting
the pile, since we would need some of that to fill the beds anyway
(although a lot less of it than we thought) and we didn't want to move any
more than absolutely necessary. That allowed us to put the raised bed
walls, basically building the garden beds around this big chunks we'd
carved out. (More about the garden beds
here.)
What followed was weeks --
WEEKS YOU GUYS! -- of serious agony and drudgery. Because not only did we
have to move all that dirt at least two more times and if you count the
TWO TIMES we already moved it from the aforementioned BIG DIG, then that's
AT LEAST FOUR TIMES THAT WE MOVED ALMOST SIXTY-FIVE CUBIC YARDS OF DIRT
AND THAT'S OVER SIX DUMP TRUCK LOADS MOVED FOUR TIMES AND CAN SOMEONE
PLEASE STOP ME BEFORE I DO A KEYBOARD SMASH THAT BREAKS TEH INTERNETS?
There is not, literally, a single square inch of our property that didn't
see the business end of our shovel.
And because we had to put
the dirt in the Totalitarian Nation of Noxious Invasive Weeds, we were
invading their sovereign borders and war was declared. Both sides
sustained heavy casualties and we considered carpet bombing with the
A-bomb of garden warfare, commercial weedkillers, but cooler heads
prevailed and we were able to avoid mutually assured destruction.
(Okay, guys? I'm the one
that wrote that and even I'm a little freaked at how closely that
analogy fits.)
So little by little, we
moved the dirt and the gravel and spread it all around. We also had to
rototill the front yard and planting beds to get rid of the grass. And then we placed
newspaper all over the damn place for weed barrier, which may or may not
have gotten us reported by our neighbors to the White Trash Hotline, but
which has the multiple benefits of being good for the soil (the cellulose
gets broken down and incorporated into the soil), the environment
(recycling all those newspapers), organic (no nasty plastic or
manufactured blankets that the leave plastic bits in the soil forever) and
oh yeah, FREE (Sal had access to big bins of newspaper from the bakery
every week, so we had as much as we could possibly need, which is a good
thing since we ended up needing the equivalent of the entire New York
Times circulation to cover our yard).
The main downside is that
because you're supposed to put the newspaper down in thicknesses of 6-7
sheets, and unfolding it all and counting the right number of sheets
takes, like, an inordinate amount of time. Not just because it takes so
long in and of itself, but because you have a tendency to get waylaid
reading an interesting article that catches your eye. Oh, and little tip
if you decide you want to do this: wetting down the newspaper in sections
after you've laid it down helps keep it in place until you can sprinkle
some dirt over it to hold it down.
We had plenty of gravel
leftover from last years' big gravel haul to not only surround the garden
beds, but also to reapply it in all the areas we'd put it down before.
Which was a good thing, since the heavy rains over the winter and our
neglect of the leaves, not to mention our neighbor's work on the fence
along the north side of the house, where he'd dug post holes and covered a
lot of our gravel with dirt on that side, all contributed to it needing
another light layer.
See how we reused the
bricks throughout the yard to line walkways, as well as the railroad ties
that were all over the yard to hold back some of the berms? Using what we
had on hand...that's resourcefulness, my friends. And also laziness -- we
didn't want to have to haul that crap down the stairs to get rid of it.
(Although I really love how they look and that they give our yard a kind
of worn, old-world look. Yay for reusing old stuff!)
Finally, all was in place,
the yard was contoured and shaped and raked and graveled and ready for the
finishing touch for the summer: barkdust! For those not familiar, it's the
mulch of choice here in the Pacific Northwest and it has the additional
advantage of hiding problem areas and making everything look so much
better even when there's nothing planted. It's like
drywall texture for your yard. But
even before it was barkdusted within an inch of its life, it looked pretty
damn good, if I may say.
So if it looked that good
with just dirt, imagine how FANTABULOUS it looked after it was barkdusted.
Actually, you'd don't have to imagine because we've got, yes, more
pictures.
Now that the yard has been
whipped into shape and it's all been barkdusted, we can stay on top of the
maintenance and enjoy the yard even as we begin planting (which we won't
start until next spring and fall). Eventually, most of what you see will
be filled in with various plantings and ground covers, but that'll take a
few years to get everything planted and then for everything to establish
itself. In the meantime, we've got a yard we can finally be proud of and
that's every bit and nice as our newly-painted house.
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