Progress Report

What We Started With

It's time to report on progress on the back yard project.  Our landscaper, Greg Eubanks of Serenity Gardens, and his helper Brian have spent the past four weeks working on it.

First they tore out the jungle of brush behind our fence, then carved out space to create a retaining wall against the hillside between our property and our neighbor's yard.  The neighbor's yard is higher than ours on the left in this picture, and the land slopes away abruptly into the canyon to the right of this picture, leaving a small, triangular space that had become overgrown with Trumpet Creeper, Jade, Pyracantha and a rather nice Plumbago with beautiful blue flowers.

Preparing to Build the Retaining Wall

The Trumpet Creeper has been the bane of my life for the past three years; it grew in a solid mass from the canyon up along our fence and garage and clear up along our drive way wall to the front of the neighbor's house.  After the canyon in the fire three years ago, the neighbor's family and Cindy and I began bring to chop it back, but it's like trying to unweave a basket from the inside.  The stems are long and thin and weave around about each other; you can cut half a dozen of them off at the ground and they'll still hang where they were because they are so intertwined with all the others.  Now it's considerably reduced, but there's still plenty of it around for the Hummingbirds.

The New Retaining Wall

Same for the Pyracantha, there's still plenty of it, too.  The Mocking Birds and Scrub Jays love it for the berries which are ripe now, but it's nasty stuff for humans to be around because of the long, sharp thorns it has all over its branches.  The Jade plant is relatively easy to deal with because it's a succulent.  In fact, it seems that if you give it a harsh look, branches will fall right off.

Another View

Greg and Brian constructed the wall using treated 2 x 6 wood planks secured with carriage bolts to  4 x 6 uprights that they sank two feet deep and cemented in.  They ran the drainage pipe behind the wall and covered it with about six inches of gravel, then covered the gravel with dirt.  The idea is to drain water away from the edge of the canyon and also provide drainage for the overflow from the rain water tanks.

Greg also created a "splash mountain" of broken concrete pieces at the base of the telephone pole. It will help with drainage, keep the vegetation down around the pole and give us a place to drain off water we don't want going into the garden.

New Planting Beds

After the wall was complete, they put a row of concrete blocks along the edge of the canyon, put weed block fabric down, built three planting areas and put down decomposed granite (DG) on the pathways and tamped it down.  This will give Cindy approximately 200 square feet of additional planting space, although because of the large trees next door it will be partially shaded most of the year.


Anyway, it looks a lot better now.

Ready To Plant!