Working on the Back Yard - Part 2 of X

Hey everybody!  Okay, when last I blogged about the back yard, we were ripping out grass and sad little plants and were building a garden.

After we finished those projects, we noticed that the back yard had a rather pronounced slope hiding under all that green.  The fence along the street was the highest point of the yard, and everything gradually headed downhill toward the house itself.  Although we are not landscape professionals, we realized this wasn't the most desirable arrangement and set to reworking things.  Even though the house is raised (with a crawl space full of nightmares below it), we didn't really want to set ourselves up for water flooding towards it, should heavy rains ever visit this area.

Doing so allowed Chris to finally fulfill his dream of renting a (smallish) tractor.  Hooray for dreams!

"Look what I got from Home Depot!"

Reversing the tractor off the trailer...

...chugging it into the back yard...

...and posing before work starts.

Chris went around on the tractor, digging up chunks of earth in sections of the yard and depositing them in other areas, and I went behind him (not directly behind him - off to the side - the exhaust on that thing was rather mighty, despite its small size), raking the dirt into position and tamping it down.

The section of yard directly behind the garage.
We ended up putting most of the dirt here,
and we probably added six-eight inches of height in this area.

Smoothing out the levels between
the one remaining grass patch and the pepper tree.

Between the pepper tree and the house.

As you can imagine, this was dirty, dusty work, and by the time we finished, we were fully disgusting.  Check out this loveliness:

The line on my wrist where my gardening gloves start.

Yum!

I should point out that although we're changing the majority of the back yard from what it was before, we did keep at least one piece of what the previous owners created.  This guy:

My new duck!

This thing is made of solid concrete, so he probably weighs about 25 pounds.  If you zoom in on the picture, you can see the the concrete cracked off the back of his neck, and there's even small pieces of rebar in there.  This duck is obviously far too important a piece of this back yard to be tossed away like rubbish (also I can barely lift him to the opening of our trash can).  I have grand plans for my friend Herbert here, and although I haven't realized them yet, they are firmly placed near the top of my never-ending to do list.

During this time, we were squirreling away funds and consulting with a local masonry company to replace our back fence with a back wall.  As I've mentioned before, our back yard is noisy, and a wall would help us reduce the volume while adding a bit more security from the busy street nearby.  For a quick reminder shot of the existing fence, just scroll up a bit (past Herbert.  I know, it's hard to take your eyes off him).

On Monday of the designated week, the wall guys came and tore out the existing fence, digging a four foot deep trench along where the new wall would go.  

Their Bobcat was bigger than ours.

We let them know we have big dogs, so they fenced off the back yard with chain link, although we kept the kids out of the yard as much as possible anyway, as we could easily see them tumbling right into the trench (Harley, mainly).  After the city inspection occurred, construction of the wall actually started on Wednesday.

Me, texting Chris and peeking through the front window:

"There's a cement mixer outside!  Cool!"

Given the time it took the inspector to come out, the wall was only half finished on Wednesday, but progress was easy to see:

That's Del Amo Blvd,

and Clara Barton Elementary across the road.

They have a jet propulsion lab!
Isn't that freaking cool?

Blocks everywhere!

On Thursday, the wall was mostly finished, so after Chris made it home from work, we headed out to a local nursery to find some better options to plant along it.  Since the palm stumps were now officially gone, anything planted along the wall should do well, as long as we took proper care of it.  Conveniently enough, the nursery planned to deliver the plants on Friday morning, while the wall guys were there, again waiting on a city inspector and adding the capstones to the top of the wall.

Eventually, everything was finished!

Whee!  It looks like a wall!

Hi, Herbert!

We arranged our nursery selections along the wall, spacing them out and finding that we need a few more:

Oops!  Oh well, there's more at the nursery.

For this wall, we picked dwarf cherry laurels; they should get about 10 feet tall and 6-8 feet wide, so once they really get growing, they'll provide a nice sound and shade screen along the wall.  The lady at the nursery mentioned they attract all of the big three: birds, bees, and butterflies, and that makes us happy as well.  As you can see, in their pots, they're already about the height of the wall, which is 6'7", so they're moving right along.

More back yard blogs to come!  

Later!

Amy