Mega-post: Backyard Nesting

As promised, MEGA-POST, with lots of pictures and explanation. Among other things, I've been busy fixing up the backyard over the past two weeks. (I've also been making jewelry for a craft show in Collingswood over Memorial Day weekend, but that's a story for another day.)

I've been reading a lot lately about the concept of nesting during a pregnancy. I don't know that I'm nesting yet. As I previously mentioned, I painted the kid's room last August, and aside from cleaning the junk out of the room, most of what we need to do at this point is get some baby furniture. A little de-clutterification, and we should be all set. (It's at this point that Hollie may disagree, but I'll leave that to her in the comments.)

But if I am nesting anywhere, it's in the backyard. Every year since we moved in, I've attempted some degree of landscaping. A few rose trellises here, a rounded corner with a birdbath there--all in the attempt to make the backyard a prettier place, less habitable to weeds. And every spring, it feels like I have to start all over again. This year, however, I have an incentive to really get things straightened out. Because in May of 2011, I'll have an 8-month old daughter, and I'd really prefer not to waste my weekends replanting and replanting and replanting. Thus I give you: Operation Less Work in 2011

Last weekend, this is just a small taste of the challenge that faced me in the backyard.
You can click on the picture to blow it up, although you do so at your own peril. That blotchy sunlight is a killer. And it's just about the only sunlight I get back there, so the only things that manage to come back every year are dandelions and at least three different kinds of wild onions (no, I haven't eaten any. Hollie won't let me.)

In the interest of setting reasonable expectations, the only thing I wanted to finish last weekend was this corner. And since our soil is so bad, Hollie and I decided to put a raised flower bed right here. The picture above makes it look more triangular, but the corner bed we carved out last year is rounded. In keeping with my geek status, I figured out the size of the raised bed by measuring the radius of the outer edge's arc, then treated that as the bisecting diagonal of a perfect square--essentially the hypotenuse of two equilateral triangles. As it happened, the sides of my square worked out to be a nearly perfect 60 inches, or 5 feet.

Next step: Once I cleared the area of weeds, I dug two 5-foot trenches, meeting at a right angle. I lined the trenches with cloth weed barrier, then covered the weed barrier with loose stone as a base for my wall, which I built using landscape timbers.
I used rocks to form a level surface. I'm not a perfectionist by nature, but I knew I'd kill myself trying to scrape a perfect level surface directly in the dirt.

Unfortunately, the timbers each had to be measured and cut separately as I built the wall, because: A). Each side, while theoretically 60 inches, changed slightly as the wall grew, because of the differing depth of my fence versus my neighbors fence; and B). Only one side at a time could be 60 inches--the other would have to be 60 inches minus the width of the timbers, generally about 4 inches, but the timbers weren't manufactured very precisely, so the width varied.

That sounds more complicated than it was, because cutting and building the wall only took about an hour. I spent more time just clearing the weeds out of the way.
That's not the completed wall, but it's nearly all the wood. Once the wall was built--and perfectly level and square, due to the stones and my earlier math--I drilled five holes through the timbers: one in the corner and two on each side. I had to drill through one layer, hit the one below it, then remove each layer, and repeat the process. My goal was to hammer five 2-foot-long rebar spikes through the walls to keep them upright once I filled it with dirt.

And once the spikes were in, I double checked my levels, just to be sure. Pay close attention to that center bubble. It's a thing of beauty.

After that, I mitered a 10-foot board, which worked perfectly given the sides 5-foot length, and screwed it to the top. Then it was just a matter of filling the box with dirt and planting the appropriate greenery. We chose a hydrangea bush and several periwinkle. We won't get any flowers on the periwinkle this year, since they bloom in early spring, but the hydrangea should look pretty good in a couple of weeks. One more thing that I hopes ensure success: I'm fertilizing using the worm poop/compost we harvested from last year's crop of red wigglers.

Tada!
Please excuse the lack of mulch to the right. I fixed it a week later, and I'll post pictures of the completed project soon.

This project has been Lola approved.