Working on the Back Yard - Part 4 of X

Photos and stories of our recent trip to Avila Beach, Paso Robles, and other parts of the Central Coast will be coming as soon as I sort through the 8 million pictures I took of the Amgen Tour of California.  In the meantime, more on the yard!

Okay, in the last yard update, I mentioned how last fall, we planted dwarf cherry laurels and two kinds of bamboo in the back yard; we also built a retaining wall and added herbs to the front yard landscaping.  As fall moved into winter, our work on the yard stagnated a bit, due not to the temperature (which was, of course, delightful here) but to the near constant rain.  As some folks may have heard, California in general was deluged with rain earlier this year, and our area was no exception; there was so much rain that this one season single handily pulled most of the state out of the decades-long drought it had been in, and several ski resorts in the mountains think they'll be open until the 4th of July due to the snow accumulation.  It was almost biblical, ya'll.

Because of the rain, the back yard turned into a mud pit; since we'd ripped out most of the grass, the dirt area absorbed all it could, but it rapidly turned into a big old mess of gross (fun times with two big dogs - I'd mop and within hours, the floors would be disgusting again).  We also found out that the crawl space under the house filled with water when it rained, so it was off to Home Depot to buy a sump pump to deal with things.  While we were at HD, we checked out some options for the front yard.  Much of the front yard landscaping was decomposed granite (DG) and mulch, and while the mulch handled the extra water just fine, the slope of our driveway combined with the constant rain washed much of the DG right down into our street.

To deal with this, we pulled the rest of the DG out of the driveway area and decided to add river rocks instead, which we hoped would both look nice and deal with the running water more effectively.

A shovel here...

...and a shovel there.

A shot of the path the water

sluiced (great word, right?)

through the upper bit of DG.

While we took out most of the DG, we kept a thin layer above the weed fabric, to help the river rocks settle properly.  We packed the DG back down and got ready to install the rocks:

After emptying 5-6 bags, it was time for another trip to HD (because of course) to buy more rocks, as we hadn't originally picked up enough (this is the story of every home improvement project to ever exist in this world).  Eventually, we were finished:

Ta da!

Now, you may be asking, what did we do with all of the DG we moved out of this area?  Well, we trucked it straight into the back yard to use in our attempt to stop the constant flooding of the crawl space I mentioned earlier.  We have three crawl space entrances; one is directly off the back of the house and the other two are on the west facing side.  The front one of these rarely got too much water, so we focused on the other two.  We cleared any rocks around them and built up DG "berms," tamping them down once in place.

Tamp, tamp, tamp

on the side of the house.

That's our master bathroom window

to Chris' right.

We also had a random bag of smaller rocks left over from some previous project, so we figured we'd put those to good use over the DG next to the crawl space furthest back (since all of us were tracking in gobs of mud, wet DG wouldn't be much better - hence the rocks).

The back crawl space - 

see how full the water is?

My only consolation was that in

being full of water,

that meant nothing could be living under there.

Except krackens, I assume.

Okay, I think that's it for now!  On the next yard update (to come whenever I have a random break from real content on the blog), we fill up a truck with free mulch!  Hooray!

Later!

Amy