Some Landscaping

It's been a few months since my last post. The reason for that is because my last post was for my roof, which was really really ridiculously expensive. So, I'm out of money for a little while and so progress is slow.

So, if you're out of money what do you work on?

Landscaping!

Landscaping is cheap as dirt to do because, well, it's mostly working with dirt. j

I've been working a lot, but mostly on weeding so there hasn't been much to post. This past week though, I started working on my flower beds and those are significantly different.

I almost forgot to take a before picture, but remembered just in time and here it is:

Note the general overgrownness of the flower bed. The trees from left to right are a crabapple (maybe) a silver-leaf maple, a flowering pear (no fruit but pretty flowers) a sumac (in the back) and a pine (might be a dwarf)

The primary shrubbery is oregon grape and there used to be vines back there but I pulled them out a month ago.

Not the strewn rocks. There is a three-layer rock wall that goes from the porch to right about the silver-leaf maple.

The grade is very uneven because in the porch corner of the bed you will find my water cutoff and a sprinkler valve about 3 inches below the side walk level and by the crabapple the grade is above the rock wall by about a foot.

This makes for a very uneven, unmaintainable, overgrown mess.

Step one is to remove the oregon grape. Some people really like it. I do not because it's very aggressive and it's spiny and so hard to weed.

The next step was to cut out a tree or two. I actually didn't mind the quantity of trees so much. (I like a lot of trees) but a few of these were a bad choice this close to my house.



Here is a picture of a fully grown silver leaf maple, which is far to big to be less than 10 feet from my foundation. It's already pretty big and it's just a baby. The sumacs get almost as big and are very aggressive which would mean weeding little sumacs out of my yard constantly.

So, me and my Dad cut down those two trees.

The shrubs are a lot thinner now and the crabapple will need a lot of trimming next season (it's too late to trim this year). It definitely looks like it will be easier to maintain.

I still have a lot of rocks lying around and the grade's not very good, so the next step was to build a rock wall all the way to the corner of the house and do some grading so it looks nice. Here you can see some progress working on the rock wall and the grading.





















I tried pulling the trees out by pulling on them with a ratchet strap and cutting the roots, which works great with smaller trees. These trees were too big though, so we just chopped them off at ground level and rasied the grade to cover them. In 5-10 years they'll be rotten and really easy to pull out.

There's also a spicket that was draining into my basement, so we built a little dry creek bed for it to drain.

Here's a photo of the end result.

And here's a photo of the front.

It's really starting to look nice with the new roof line and the repaired beds.

Now I just need to get the sprinklers working right in both beds and plant a few lovely plants.

anyone want to go shrubbery shopping with me?