Monday, June 30, 2014

Landscaping

There's still plenty to do in the interior but April and May are the best months for putting in a new lawn and planting shrubs.  The whole yard is just dirt at this point from all the trucks and machines rolling over it these past few months. While in some ways, I hate to plant a big lawn that'll need to be mowed every week, it's important to stabilize the soil so that the rain doesn't erode it all away into the lake.  In fact, the building inspector won't issue a certificate of occupancy until the site is stabilized against erosion.

My landscaping plan calls for reducing the grade of the back yard by building a retaining wall several feet back from the lake.  This should give me a more usable back yard, slow down the rain runoff as it moves toward the lake, and create a border between the wild growth by the lake's edge and the lawn area.

I hired Ed Coykendall and his company Landscape Artisans, to do the work.


The retaining wall under construction



This is the section of the wall where we'll attach the wooden steps that lead down to the dock.


Done

A few months laters with the stairs down to the lake.

The sidewalk going in in the front





Graded, shrubbed and seeded


Hmmm, what's that?

Ah, someone else likes my new yard

Looks like at some point this summer I'm going to be seeing some baby
turtles coming up out of the lawn.


Looks like a house!