Building raised beds and regrading the back yard...

Last Thursday I started on my biggest project outside, digging in the backyard between the house and the pool.  There is at least a twelve inch difference between the pool deck and the top of the basement wall, with the land all sloped towards the house.  We have gotten water in the basement once this year and hopefully I will be able to prevent it from happening again by digging out the basement wall and regrading the area.

I managed to tear up almost a third of the area that I need to, before the rains yesterday and today stopped me.  The single plant in the bed at this point is a rose bush that had been growing up against the house in front of the phone junction box.  I am hoping that it survives the transplant, since it had lovely red flowers last year, most of the root system was directed away from the house though so I am not certain that I will be successful with that one.

The amount of dirt I had to remove to get below the top of the cement block was incredible, and to tell the truth I still have a few more inches to go on a lot of it to be able to slope the ground away form the house and have a narrow planting bed against the house.

I think that once it is all done that it will look great, there is just so much digging that needs to be done.  So far the finished bed has two rose bushes, one moved from the front of the house, with a third to be moved from the front sometime this week.  It also has curly parsley, chives, oregano, eucalyptus, rosemary, thyme, lavender, and catnip.  I will likely add some more to it as time goes on, but for now it is started.

Now I just have to dig out the other half of the yard, regrade and transplant what I need to, and dig down to the footers along the house.  The last may take a while, but not too long I hope.

New trees

Now we have five poplar planted along the driveway for fast shade, they are almost as thin as the stick holding up the reflector.  I also took the sod between two flowering bushes that we planted last fall, and put it on some of the exposed area left from grinding out the stump from our monster tree.  Where the sod was removed I put two of the poplar trees, and later will be adding bulbs and day lilies for added color.  Eventually we will add concrete to the driveway to straighten out where it used to go around the largest tree.

Up front we put in our first fruit tree, a four in one cherry tree that we picked up from the Andersons.  The four cherries are; Bing, Lapins, Montmorency, and Stella.  The Montmorency is a self fertilizing tart cherry, good for pies.  The Lapins is a cross that is also self fertilizing, but it is a sweet cherry.  The Stella is another sweet cherry that is self fertilizing.  The Bing is the only cherry on this tree that isn't self fertilizing, but the other three are all good fertilizers for it.  The only section of the tree that did not have full leaves was the Montmorency, but since they were all like that at the store, I am making the assumption that it is just a little later in pushing out leaves than the rest.

and the Trees Came Down

Our house went from having three nice sized trees out front to zero over the winter.  All three had a fungal infection that made removing them the only option.  The largest was so rotten in the middle that I could stick my hand in the middle of the stump and reach around underneath it.  So we went from the front of our house having plenty of shade, most coming from the monster tree next to the driveway, to nothing at all.