This was barely started last year, and we found an hour to spare today with co-operation from the weather, so we hopped on it. Tomorrow I’ll post a bit more info about this project area overall.
For now, just two progress images, and I did not plan the before/after well because the shots are not exactly the same, though one seems much closer than the other thanks to Photoshop cropping. I put in arrows on the worse off pairing to show which post in the fence is the same to give a better idea of the change.
The growing greenery you see above and below is lilies that are quite old and sooooo many generations. I transplanted just a small fraction today, as you can see from the small but disturbed area at the top of the after half.
The other side has a lot going on, which I’ll touch on more tomorrow. The wood border piece you see in the after is one of a handful that came with the house. We used one last year in the front yard when I was toying with the idea of terracing the front slope (I’m still uncertain about the notion as of this writing.) The wood used to surround a mostly rubber tarped graveled area that we are pretty sure
was a playset at one point (we found a swing seat that I reused as a mini doormat for the side garage door.) There’s also some landscape fabric there too. Both the rubber and the fabric are disintegrating.
As I was writing about that, I remembered that I had already shared a shot of that area in a prior post. As you can see in this repost of the image, the area spawned many volunteers during the neglect years. We gave up trying to clean up the gravel and linings as we had other pressing projects at the time.
As I mentioned above, the arrows point to the same post of that fence to show you the movement between images on my part–apologies for my poor planning there. The sandy gravel “pool” on the left is now cleaned up a bit with just dirt after we swept.
From where we lowered the soil away from the bottom of the fence pickets, I lifted the moss growing there and pressed patches into the soil below the wood border. I’m going to keep an eye on it, and will toothpick the pieces in places if they start to lift. My hope is to add more mosses over time so they will spread there to help suppress weeds and retain the slight bit of soil given the unevenness of the driveway surface. (This is the east side of our home, so quite a bit of shade along there most of the day due to how close our east neighbor is, the fence, and later in the day, our house). We have many, many wonderful mosses on our property that were a lovely surprise last year, and I have had success so far with transplanting some to other suitable spots in small batches and letting them do their thing.
All the built up soil we removed is in a pile farther back in the yard that I will eventually sift through with my screen frame to pick out rocks for the dry river bed project on the opposite side of the house. (Part of our overall water management plan for here.)
Just for fun, here’s a shot of one of the lilies I took last year on the 5th of July (2017 in case anyone reading this later isn’t immediately aware of my writing this post in 2018).
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