After 9 months of work and planning, 170 cubic yards
of dirt and rocks moved in and out, our
yard is now complete. Here are some before pictures.
One of our first projects was to dig a drainage trench.
This trench is 35 feet long, 2 feet wide and
4-5 feet deep. So far it has worked great.
Next we dug out the entire hillside to make room
for a rock wall. With our luck we managed to find
a tree stump about the size of a small car. Great.
So we did what any reasonable person would do,
hire somebody to take it out. This was the only
part of the project we did not do ourselves.
Now that the hillside was dug out we could start
making our rock retaining wall. We used 3.5 tons
of rustic basalt for the wall.
The wall area was leveled, compacted and
a layer of gravel then sand was laid.
My dad working on our wall. It ended up being
2-2.5 feet tall and 30 feet long.
Next we moved on to digging out the flower beds.
The soil in Gladstone is more rock and clay
than soil, so we dug out everywhere our flower beds
would go about 6-12 inches deep, then brought in 80
cubic yards of garden mulch to fill them in. We had
7 piles of dirt this size dropped off.
Planning for another flower bed.
Once the flower beds were in we dug out our
existing lawn then brought in 30 yards of
sandy loam soil to till into the clay soil.
We rented the largest tiller we could get our hands on
and spent the entire day tilling, raking and rolling the dirt.
Then, instant lawn.
Arwen even helped.
Here is the lawn all rolled out, not yet edged but green.
Breaking in the new yard, Sum, my folks and
Daniel, our friend and garden go-to encyclopedia.
Here are some photos of our flowers as they
bloomed over the spring, and more to bloom this summer.
And our resident ducks in the pond.
Here are some after photos, the end of the project.
We have edged the lawn and installed a
low pressure irrigation system and the
yard is ready to go for summer. 9 months of
work that was all worth it.
