landscaping

We've been hard at work outside this week, trying to accomplish some minor projects before summer hits us and we dive into some big projects. Fortunately the projects we are working on are pretty low budget- we have the things (rocks, soil, gravel, tools, etc) we need at one property or the other, unfortunately these projects are all weirdly intertwined and proving to be a little more time consuming than we thought and transportation, in our smallish trunks, is also not ideal.

This all started by clearing out the raspberry bushes, there were a lot of tiger lilies popping up everywhere. Naturally I wanted to get the lilies out of my raspberries, but I didn't want to get rid of them all, so I had to clear a place to transplant them to. We filled up one empty bed in the front of our house, but I also thought having some by the garage in back would be nice (opposite the raspberries). This meant we had to remove the rock. I know this doesn't look like a lot of rock, but the first 3 feet filled up all our containers (and our car) and this stuff lines the whole other side of the yard.

 

The good news is that we have plans for all this rock. We are going to use it to make a path at the duplex to the upper unit's back door. I had originally thought I would go with stepping stones, but I figure I might as well use what I have.

Before we can put the rocks in at the duplex though we had to dig the path. It's a relatively short path, maybe 10 feet. I thought we could easily knock this out in one evening, and just fill a trashcan up with the dirt to bring back to our house (to use to fill a hole in one corner of or property- so resourceful!).

We both grossly underestimated the volume of dirt this would produce and just digging out maybe a third of the path filled up our trashcan (and buckets), so we had to stop just a little short of completion.

So hopefully we can finish this project up this weekend in only 12789 more trips.

Oh, and of course we are trying to do most of this transporting using our 1 spare yard-waste trash can. And before we can dump the dirt out to fill the hole, we have to get the gravel out of the hole (why is there a gravel pit on the property, I don't know). Once the gravel is out, we can dump out the dirt, and fill it with rock- then transport and repeat. It's all quite tedious. But where are we going to put all this gravel??