What do you think?

I was buying more rock this weekend so I could finally finish off the shade bed in the backyard. They've started giving me a discount at Oregon Decorative Rock, I'm there so often.

Greg thinks I should add a third layer of rock to make the retaining wall look more substantial.

That makes things a little tricky, since the soil level should rise to meet the top of the wall. You want the soil to meet the house at least four, but ideally six inches, from where the wood starts so you don't get termites. So I'd have to create a slope and grade the soil back toward the house. It's not impossible but it might look funny.

What say you? Add another level?

Leave it be?

I can't decide.

Aquarium, be gone!

When I built the rain garden out front I only intended to use rocks right where the water was entering it, to prevent erosion. I had used every large rock I had scavenged in the backyard rain garden, so while I was at Home Depot buying the PVC pipe I picked up a bag of rocks. Those rocks were very small.

The backyard rain garden right after installation, with nice fat rocks

Once I got the small stones in the rain garden I kind of liked the idea of a dry creek bed. So I got more bags of small stones but then it looked less like a creek bed and more like the bottom of an aquarium. Laurrie helpfully advised making it wider (so the scale would be right when the plants get bigger) and to add larger rocks.

I ran down to Oregon Decorative Rock and grabbed a 50 pound bag of mixed medium stones and handpicked 25 larger stones. We had also scavenged some really large river rocks when we moved the dirt pile in back. I have over 60 gardening blogs in my RSS reader and I know someone posted in the last week about how to make these look natural, but of course I can't find it now.

It needs more rock down on this end but I'm not sure how to terminate the creek bed naturally.

In nature, as the water in a river (or under a glacier) slows down it drops the larger, heavier stones first. I tried to add more of the largest stones at the sides where they'd be in nature (the water is slower there), and to bury them a little in the center of the rain garden.  It still doesn't look quite right but it looks a lot better than before. And hey, look at me using those hydrology/geography classes from college! I also used algebra to calculate the water runoff to this thing. If building a rain garden has taught me anything, it's that Mom was right: you will use this stuff later in life.

I removed the dagger-leaf rushes that were responding so poorly to the summer heat and relocated a slough sedge. I need to buy more rock and then maybe have Greg's parents over to help with rock placement. They have a gorgeous garden and they have a good eye for this kind of thing.

I also decided to move one of the Zaschnerias that got covered by the Coreopsis. I thought I had read that they spread through rhizomes but it turns out they have a tap root and none of that foliage is anchored into the ground. I don't know that this guy will survive the move.

I'm still waiting for that Festuca glauca 'Golden Toupee' to get up to size. It grows so. very. slowly. If any of you more experienced gardeners want to get opinionated on the creek bed (or anything else), I am all ears. Just don't tell me I'll use that Women in World Religions class that I dropped my junior year.

Are we done yet?

This weekend I started to remove sod in the backyard where I'm going to increase the planting beds, but I remembered that I hate removing sod so I decided to work on the front yard instead. It's nice to have options.

Thus, we have a rock wall to separate the gravel mulch from the bark mulch. I'm not sure if I like it yet. I don't have much experience working with rock so it doesn't look terribly organic. Of course, the rocks in the bottom of the rain garden annoy me so much that they are all I see in this photo.

Rock is expensive so I just ran it across the front with the hope to enclose the whole area down the line.

We really need to incorporate some decorative boulders and rocks so it's not just gravel and flat rock.

I'm really not crazy about how it looks on the back side but that can be improved later. (Someone tell me this will look great once it fills in with weeds.)

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And while we're telling me lies, someone tell me that the piece of cedar bender board will actually keep the cedar chips and gravel separate.

But I've decided I'm not going to sweat any of my landscaping choices until things start growing. I discovered that these plants that thrive on poor soils annoy me me because I can't do anything proactive with them. They want sun, not too much water, and no fertilizer or compost. So I can't fuss over them. I just have to wait. I hate that.

So I can feel like I'm doing something productive in the front yard, I police the grass that wants so badly to return. If I had to do this project over again I would have left the whole front yard under black plastic all winter to really kill the lawn. I keep finding individual blades of grass poking up in the bare spots, despite the fact that I used a sod cutter, then roto-tilled, then applied a thick layer of mulch.

Fun fact: when I tell non-gardeners that I've planted agave they tend to ask me if I'm going to make tequila. This weekend the kid at Oregon Decorative Rock informed me, "I just use sugar, myself." Alrighty then.

I'm fixing a hole

There was a big hole in the backyard that was covered with some cement slabs.  I decided to excavate the hole in preparation for plants.

So I started digging and pulling out chunks of concrete. And more chunks. And then I started thinking about a conversation I had with friends this weekend about wheelbarrows and how they sometimes called them wheelbarrels even though wheelburrow might make more sense (except that it doesn't, BILL) and somehow burial cairns came up.  You know, shallow graves covered in stones so animals wouldn't dig up the body. 

The whole point of this rambling side story is that I started to worry that I was dissembling a cairn. Did I mention that I had just returned from talking to the neighbor about the fence and he told me they found a HEADSTONE in their backyard? The previous owner had lost her husband and they had to bring out someone to make sure she hadn't buried him back there (she hadn't). 

He calmly told me, "That might have been a dealbreaker." MIGHT have been?

So yeah, nerve-wracking.  And the hole kept getting bigger.

But there was no body that I could see. Thank you, backyard gods.

Now I just have to fill this humongous hole somehow. Anybody have a body they need to dispose of?