At Home In The Woods

[Obed]

Obed -

Place is looking great! I particularly like the picture of the house in the background, with the driveway on the left....gives a good perspective of the place!
I've done the same this summer, regrading essentially my whole 1.4 acres to swale water away from the garage, and make some drivable paths.
As far as topsoil, shop around. I was lucky enough to find an old farmer closeby that charges 110 bucks delivered for NICE topsoil not screened, but nicer than other screened loads I've gotten. That's in a single axle IH, and he heaps it over! I once (burn me once) this summer got a load of black loam from one of these landscape places....think it was close to 300 bucks.

Are you having some dozer work done as well? Get any seat time?

Frank

Frank,
Thanks. Yes, the place is starting to shape up. We are getting really close to having the grading job finished. The grading job will have taken 6 months from start to finish. We are ready to move on to something else. The springtime had lots of rain which led to long delays. Whenever we got significant rainfall, the red clay took several days to dry before the dozer could continue working. The dozer/highlift moved the huge piles of red clay and gave the yard its basic shape by sometime in July. The contractor also took down about 30 trees last spring with his excavator and chipped them up with a rented chipper.

Around July, we told the contractor we wanted to wait until the autumn to put down the topsoil and plant grass as that was the best time to plant. I spent about 2 months doing the finish work to the yard with my box blade. I removed lots of dirt and spread it on a couple paths in the woods. The contactor removed as little dirt from the yard as he could because moving the dirt to the woods was time consuming. I removed as much dirt as possible in order to minimize the severity of the slope at some places. Yes, there has been LOTS of seat time.

It sounds like you got a deal on topsoil. Our quoted price for sifted topsoil with compost mixed in was $420/tandem load. Ouch. And we needed lots of topsoil. It just turned out that we had a bunch of topsoil on our property beside the garden area where we took down some trees to make the driveway to the basement. There was enough good topsoil removed from the driveway area to spread 4" over our entire yard! That saved us at least $1000. Our yard was almost all red clay with very little topsoil.

Obed

 

[Obed]

We Have Grass!

It took two weeks from seeding for the grass to look like this. I was rather surprised that it grew so quickly. We have a mixture of three types of fescue grass. We got several good days of rain right after we sowed the grass so that really helped. We've also been watering the lawn.

 

[PAGUY]

Looking good Obed. Now you will have another chore around the house - cutting the lawn. I think with your luck the Mrs. will be the one that cuts the grass.

 

[Obed]

Looking good Obed. Now you will have another chore around the house - cutting the lawn. I think with your luck the Mrs. will be the one that cuts the grass.

Somehow, I don't think I will be that lucky. However, I expect I will be lucky enough that she will tend the garden.:thumbsup:

I have made efforts to minimize the amount of grass trimming that will need to be done. I'm trying to get most things so that I can mow right up against them with the riding lawn mower. The other day my wife mentioned something about landscape timbers or something similar beside one of the future landscaping beds around the house. I asked her who was going to trim the grass growing up against the timbers because I wasn't going to do it. The landscaping timbers idea quickly vanished.

Obed

 

[Obed]

On Sept. 14, topsoil was roughly spread around the yard. The topsoil was somewhat damp and needed to dry out before it could be finish graded. As mentioned here, we didn't have to buy any topsoil. The skid steer hauled dirt from the pile in the garden clearing and spread it around the house. The quality of the topsoil looked very good and there was plenty of it.

The same day, the contractor started grading the parking pad at the main floor garage. During the original house escavation, the contractor (the same one who is doing the current grading work) spread out some of the red dirt from the basement onto the parking pad. He wasn't supposed to do that but he did. I had been very explicit about not adding fill dirt under the garage concrete and under the outside parking pad. However, I had so much going on at the time with the house buidling job, I didn't have the time and energy to fight about the parking pad.

Unfortunately, at that time, not only did the contractor add dirt to the parking pad but the grade sloped such that water drained toward the garage instead of away from it. At the time, I did mention the slope issue to the contractor but he claimed it did not slope that direction. I didn't have a good way to measure the slope back then so didn't pursue it even though the slope looked to my eyes to be the wrong. It turned out that I was correct; the grade sloped the wrong direction. So now, over a year and a half later, I am paying him again to remove the dirt that he shouldn't have added in the first place. The parking pad with the embedded gravel in the red clay was impossible to dig up with my little tractor.

Back to the current job, at mid-afternoon the contractor, under the direction of my wife, accidentally dug up an underground drain pipe he had installed for one of our rain gutter downspouts. That's something we had to fix a few days later.

 

[dstig1]

Looks great!

 

[jinman]

Obed, your levelling progress and topsoil looks really nice. I'm sure you want to get some grass growing quickly so things won't wash away during rain storms. I would be building temporary terraces to direct water if it were my place, but you may have some quick grow rye that will sprout before it gets too cold and hold onto your soil. Whatever method you choose, I'm sure you are looking forward to getting the bare ground covered. When I built my house, it was a constant fight to keep from tracking in dust/dirt/mud even though I always took off my shoes at the door.

It's really fun to make a house a home, and I admit that I'm thinking I agree with your wife about putting landscape timbers, stone, or curbing around flowerbeds. If you don't do that, you'll eventually spend more time trimming grass out of the flowers than you would running a string trimmer around the flowerbeds. In my case, trimming around trees in my yard is the hardest task and the one that has to be done most carefully so as not to damage the tree.

 

[scoutcub]

Obed -

Wow, the place looks completely different with grass!! Really looks good!

As for the "edging".....don't think you can avoid it. We're up against the same thing. 2 essential choices.....landscape timbers, solid plastic/metal short fencing, i.e. "bordering". Or, you can choose not to use these, but then have to edge the grass directly downward into the dirt creating the edge.
We've chose to use the solid roll of black edging, used it on the last house with good results. Pain to get it in, but it's a good border between grass and flower/shrub beds.

As for the dirt work.....did you have a chat with the contractor? Mention to him he's undoing his work you didn't want him to in the beginning? And about breaking the drain line? Seems to me he's charging you twice for the same job, and threw in a little damaged line to boot.....perhaps some re-negotiation on his fees would be in order?


Frank

 

[buckeyefarmer]

My experience with borders is they don't hold back the grass, and are a PITA to keep trimmed. I also go by the saying, if it can't be cut with the riding mower, it didn't need to be cut. :laughing: If you take a spade and shovel the edges back every year or two (like landscapers do), then you minimize the grass encroachment. Do it early in the spring when the ground is soft, it's real easy. If you wait till June or July, it's a lot harder. If you have straight edges on the flower beds, the FEL makes a nice edging tool.

 

[jinman]

Obed -

Wow, the place looks completely different with grass!! Really looks good!

Frank, I completely missed the grass photos until reading your post. Then, I went back and looked. I agree with you completely. Obed's grass looks wonderful. He did a great job getting it up and hopefully if will hold onto his soil.

EDIT: On the subject of flower beds, I've had mixed success with different types of materials used for borders. The very best I've come up with is a 6" wide timber around the edges of the flowerbed and up maybe 1" to 2" above the ground level. I've used 6x6 posts made for ground contact and 6x6 timbers cut from telephone poles (my latest and best). These are not very dressy, but you can add concrete scalloped borders inside to improve the look as in the 2nd photo below. Where the scalloped sections will get grass if they are the only thing used, with the timber there is no danger of grass growing into them. What I find is that grass may jump over a border that is narrow, but a 6" border provides a great barrier for most grasses. On mine, I can actually put my mowers deck over the top of the timber and trim grass without using a string trimmer, but it looks much better when I do use a string trimmer.

Another way to do a border is with native stones. You need to cover the ground beneath the stones with landscape cloth to help control grass. My long bed of iris and cannas is an example. As with any border of this type, you'll eventually get weeds. However in the last photo below, you can see where I used flat rocks to make a border and the grass just grew right between the rocks so that this always was a big maintenance job in the summer.