Readers may have noticed that new posts more or less disappeared in the first half of the summer, and were light for the second half.
Here’s why:
It started with the retaining wall for this garden. Mary Jo needed an isolated garden built to grow sweetgrass plants for some research she was doing. Originally, it had 2 more layers on top, plus a fence to keep the dogs out. This has a foundation that’s 18 feet long, and laying that foundation levelly is what takes so long: Mary Jo estimated that I did about 3 feet per hour, including trenching, laying and leveling the foundation for a wall — I didn’t believe her at first until I measured it myself. I think there were 8 layers in total, and probably 5 steps up that slope.
I had 4 students as paid help over the summer, and I think they put in about 40 hours in total. Eric helped me with much of the garden above, but I did most of the stacking. This photo is it after the experiment was over. To get the sweetgrass, and all its roots out, the wall had to be partially deconstructed. After doing that, I noticed that Eric and I had been too casual about alternating the blocks, so this wall has to be almost completely rebuilt in late September. Mary Jo worries about me cutting block with a diamond saw, so Eric and I initially built this out of whole blocks. In retrospect, it needed a lot of carefully sized blocks, which you can see on the left end, to get the upper levels of the wall properly supported. So in Round 2 I cut a lot of block for this wall.
But, if you build one wall, you can build more than one. So I ordered as much block as could be delivered on one truck: 7 pallets, each weighing 3,500 pounds. I also got some sand and gravel, but I wish I’d gotten more of this delivered; I ended up buying a lot in bags in Home Depot. And I started solving slope problems around my yard. This is the big one:
If you look carefully above, you can see the problem area on the curve, where I had to cut blocks to make the curve work and support the upper layers. So I got the saw even though it worried Mary Jo.
That’s a 95 foot foundation, with 8 layers, and 8 steps. Getting this done before we left on vacation in late June was a big deal. Most of that dirt and mulch was there, but we did move it from other spots around the yard. Eric provided a lot of help on this one; I wouldn’t have gotten in done in time without his help.
Then I moved out front, and did this little one in early July:
This one has an 18 foot foundation, plus 1-3 layers on top. Back in the corner, that mortared wall had to be leveled professionally, but I put in a drain about 2 feet down along its concrete footer to carry water through the gate.
Across the way is this one that took me through the rest of July:
This has a 33 foot foundation, 2-3 layers on top of that, and 5 steps. I also put a drain along the base of that mortared wall in the back. The garden needed a lot of dirt to elevate it: about 8.5 tons, dropped by a truck and moved by wheelbarrow. That local clay soil is very fine, so I amended it with about a ton of manure, and 4 huge bales of perlite. Over that went the rhyolite you see here – about 5 tons spread across 3 gardens.
In August I started on this one:
This one has a 50 foot foundation, 3-4 layers, about 8 steps, and more rhyolite. I also ran some PVC under the concrete sidewalk in the upper left with a water cannon. Through it I ran sprinkler lines for a — heretofore kind of useless — little garden on the far side of those railings. And coming back through I ran the drain from our air conditioner down to a dry well in the bottom right. Thanks to Brent who helped lay the far right end, Ryan who dug a bunch of trench, Jon who laid some block and dug out most of the dry well by hand, and Eric who wiggled the water cannon past the last obstacle under the sidewalk. This one got done just a bit after meeting days had started up for the Fall semester.
Before that one was done, Eric, Jon and Ryan went back to the backyard, and dug a bunch of trench for the one below, and Jon and Ryan started laying the foundation for the curve, but it was washed unlevel by a storm before I could finish it. So I started from scratch with this one, which has a 33 foot foundation, 3-4 levels, and 3 steps. It didn’t get done until the end of September.
You can see the cable for our internet, but what you can’t see is that I unburied some conduit I’d laid back here about 7 years ago, and wired a timer switch on the inside of the house, a GFCI protected line, and 2 outlets outside: one on the house, and one on the mortared wall. We’ve already had Halloween lights up on a Piñon tree right behind where I’m standing, and we’re all set up to have some twinkly party lights all around the backyard next summer. Many thanks to Eric for helping me run the slippery Romex through the conduit one August afternoon while the vXfamily was down the street at the beach (and getting the thrill of a lifetime when a helicopter had to draw water from the lake to fight a grass fire near the state liquor store).
While I worked on that, Brent did this one all by himself in one August afternoon (that was very productive for both of us).
That one has a 15 foot foundation, at least one step, and 2-3 layers on top. The vXgirls did the rock garden behind it.
All told, I think our yard is heavier by 14 tons of block, 10 tons of soil, 5 tons of rhyolite, 2 tons of sand, and a ton of gravel.
Oh … and while doing this I taught full-time during MayMester, full-time in SUU’s regular 10 week summer semester, and the full-time equivalent for 7 weeks for UNO through the Ph.D. course I videoconference for them.
Many thanks to Eric, Brent, Jon and Ryan for all their help.
With any luck, all this work will make our house more marketable.
My knee started hurting worse in midsummer, and on the left of that curve in the second-to-last picture something popped in it.
It hasn't healed, and Dr. Delcore's got me scheduled for an MRI next week. He thinks I tore cartilage and need to get it scoped.
F*ck!
Posted by: Dave Tufte | January 13, 2012 at 11:52 AM