Three truckloads of soil transported and shovelled to level the ground in front of the new fence along the roadway, and to fill the channel along the driveway where the old fence and posts were not replaced but from where we removed a LOT of gravel for raising the grade along the front.
The woman who owned this place before us was odd, to say the least. Some of her landscaping choices were baffling, and her use of gravel is still causing us grief. She was not a person who had ever lived anywhere but a condominium previously, that must was apparent. The place was too much for her to manage and she knew nothing about home or yard maintenance.
When we bought, we found the realtors photos from when she bought it five years prior to selling it to us, and the yard looked far nicer then. No fence, a full lawn, plants edging the courtyard, and so on.
When the woman we bought from built the fence to contain her dogs, rather than maintain grass on the outside of the fence, or along the roadway, she must have brought many truckloads of gravel in.
She dug down a foot or more, lined the channel with landscape fabric, and filled it with gravel the full length of the driveway.
She put landscape fabric over the grass in front of the fence all along the road and covered all of that with probably two yards of gravel. That was all on a steep slope and so it basically all eventually shifted down against the old fence.
She created a french drain in the backyard under one of the rhododendrons – which was probably a smart thing to do and involved a ton of gravel – and put drainage all along the walls of the courtyard….removing all of the plant material and soil that used to be there and replacing it with yet another massive amount of gravel.
The big maple tree shades the centre of the yard and, when it rains hard, turns the area into a small lake. Her solution was to spread more gravel all over that area.
She also poured gravel as a sort of path around the back of the garden.
I have a personal hate for gravel after how much of it I have raked up, shovelled out, and moved around. It’s truly remarkable how much there is.
Hopefully tomorrow we can manage to dig a few holes in the front of the courtyard wall, another place we scraped and shovelled gravel from to level and grade the new fence area, and get the plants that have been living and growing in the planters… into the ground. The front yard is a bit of a disaster with them all pulled away from the wall and sitting on the lawn, such as it is.
More soil is in our near future, but the yard project is coming along, slowly but surely 🙂
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