Yard chores at the Aerie

I’ve got a couple of pictures to show what I’ve been up to in the yard.

First up is the raised bed I’ve constructed on the edge of the lawn area.

The bed is 16 feet long by 8 feet wide with a 4’x4’ square “removed” for the rosebud tree planted in the center. That's 144 square feet of planting area. I used four courses of landscape timbers to create this raised bed. You can only see two because the others are below ground level in an attempt (unsuccessful) to make the whole thing level. There was still too much pitch in the far corner for that to happen.

I dug down to remove as many rocks from the area as possible and screened the loosened clay soil to remove even more. I went about 5 or 6 inches below the bottom tier of timbers. Each timber is 4 inches thick so there's upwards of 20 inches of loosened soil within the bed. Then I shoveled in the top soil we purchased from a local quarry. It’s a bit of a sandy loam mix so I worked the clay into it. I’ll get some peat moss and work that in before the soil freezes for the winter. Then, next spring, it will be ready for planting. It gets a good 8 hours and more of sunlight where it’s located so any garden veggies will do well if I can succeed in fencing out the rabbits.

The second little project was to solve a problem created when I filled behind the retaining walls.
Since the fill material is on a slope and the roof has no gutters there has been some erosion of soil. When it rains, huge amounts of water pour off the roof just in front of the front door. There are two perpendicular sections of roof coming together there and the valley funnels the water to this location. In an attempt to put a halt to the erosion this causes, I've erected two stone walls perpendicular to the flow. This allows me to have several tiered areas where the water will, hopefully, sink into the soil instead of running off.

I tamped down the fill in the areas where I wanted to erect the short walls. Collecting the flatties to construct the walls was just a matter of walking around the yard although if I needed more I’ve got plenty on the 17 acres of land on which the Aerie sits!

The soil here will also get the peat moss treatment and will be planted next spring with perennials that like the shade. Only the section at the bottom gets much sunlight. The trade off is that the section up toward the front door is very protected from the wind.