Tag Archives: landscaping

Backyard design and garden update

We survived the night in the tent, but we did wake up to a frost. I am very thankful that it was for only one night. I get to sleep in my own bed tonight.

After spending time outside yesterday, I realized that the backyard has come along way since we posted our design progress a month or so back. We are in fact ready for sod (though it might be too late for us to lay it down before winter).

The winter vegetable gardens are coming along too, though slowly but I suppose that is due to the colder temperatures now. Here are photos of the everlasting bell peppers (still growing from Summer), the swiss chard, broccoli, cabbages and spinach.

    

We have carrots and cauliflower too but they were planted a little late and are still quiet small.

That’s it for today – my new dwell magazine just arrived in the mail and the banana bread is about to come out of the oven – time for a coffee break :-). I will post the banana bread recipe tomorrow.

Backyard Garden Design 3: Weekend Progress

As mentioned in the previous post, this weekend’s goal was to start and hopefully get the backyard garden done based on the design shown here.

Thank you to our weekend worker bee helpers – Dieter, Justin, Rob, Brian, and Chris…we wouldn’t be as far along as this without your help. Here is the progress so far.

  1. Draw, measure and line up the design
  2. Dig the lines out to put the sand.
  3. Move the sand and level out to put the wood blanks
  4. End of Day 1 – corners built
  5. Building up the walls (End of Day 2 of the weekend)
      
  6. All brackets hammered in to hold the wall, french drains in (weed fabric, pipes and gravel).
  7. Dirt being leveled out to full in the level/first tier.
      

Not too far away now, next steps:

  • Need more dirt to fill in the levels – probably another truck load
  • Need to find the concrete slab steps
  • Need to order and lay sod

Quick Update: Weekend Projects

We arrived back from vacation with an action packed weekend planned.

Firstly, I am ecstatic about my first sale on Etsy. I finished making a custom order for chair bags (for 11 in. wide kids chairs).
  

The first picture is the actual color swatch which shows the true color, the second picture is the finished bag but the photo was taken in the evening light.

The other big project this weekend is the backyard – we are having a “working bee”, where friends come over and help us out with manual labor in exchange for food and drinks. The two walled levels are being put into the backyard as designed in the previous post. This weekend we should have the following update done to that post (cross fingers 🙂 ):

Additional steps over the next few weekends:

  • Order and get the wood (DONE)
  • Order and get the sand, gravel and dirt (DONE – except for the gravel)
  • Lay out the step walls  (DONE)
  • Put in french drains behind each step  (DONE)
  • Fill in with soil  (DONE)
  • Order and install concrete step tops
  • Order and get sod
  • Add the additional vegetable garden  (DONE)
  • Place the boarders for the vegetable garden path
  • Fill with stones

I will post photo’s on Monday on the progress of our back yard :-).

My projects, over the weekend is to try to make progress on the:

  1. Four Season’s Quilt
  2. Place mats
  3. New Monster Designs