We’ve just finished Day 5 of the big, backyard landscaping project. It is involving rebuilding the retaining walls (which apparently shouldn’t have been built sloped as dirt slides right on through over time), shoring up the back fence, repairing the back gate, adding new fencing and gates on either side of the house, re-installing gopher wire in the planting beds and re-doing the drip irrigation system, leveling out a play area for the kids, amending the soil in the planting beds, removing our dead oak tree, and ripping out the front lawn (and re-landscaping it). It is a big project!
Here’s a view of the leveled out hillside where the play area will be.
Poor fellas dug out that hillside one shovelful at a time!
A retaining wall will be built in back (with the possibility of having a nice built-in bench as well) and the top will be a nice planting bed (haven’t decided yet what to plant).
The kids are pretty excited! We’re hoping to border the edge with some strawberries to buffer the kids from a potential fall and to give them a harvesting activity up there. I’d like to plant other kid-friendly stuff–sugar snap peas, cherry tomatoes–but we’ll see what we’ll end up doing.
So far, we are very pleased with the landscapers. They’ve given us a lot of great ideas and are obviously far more technically competent than the original hirees.
Here’s a picture of the backyard when we first moved in…
Tom and I hand-weeded that entire hillside!!! And, for years, we thought we’d continue working on the backyard ourselves. Yes, that was before we had kids and thought we’d still have at least some leisure time!
After we weeded that whole damn hillside, we planted tomatoes and a few other plants.
Then, for many years, we had our path and sloped retaining walls (badly built, apparently).
It even looked pretty awesome at times!
Now, we can’t wait to see how this next iteration of our backyard will look! I will also be very happy to worry less about kids falling off the path and tumbling all the way down a rocky hill and onto concrete or flagstone!
