canoetrpr
Veteran Member
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2005
- Messages
- 2,382
- Location
- Ontario, Canada
- Tractor
- Kubota M7040 cab/hyd shuttle - current, Kubota L3400 - traded
At some point I plan on taking on a landscaping project on my front yard. It's about an acre in size.
Not planning on doing anything terribly fancy here. The front of the house has a decrepid 2 ft x 30 ft flower bed. I plan to dig it deeper and make it wider and reshape it. The middle of the yard has 10ft x 8ft section which I guess was intended to be flower bed of some sort but has a pile of ugly bushes in it - some are about 6 feet high. Meybe they looked good when they were small but I'd want to get rid of that area entirely probably - pull out the bushes some how, grade and just grow grass over it.
I could go after the digging with a loader/toothbar. Shape out the new flower bed by hand and then get in there with the loader to dig down. Dig around my 'bush bed' to get to the roots of the bushes and then maybe pull them out with a chain or something.
My concern is that I would ruin the rest of the grass with ruts with all the digging. I can sure dig with my loader/toothbar but have absolutely no finesse doing so. One option is that I just go down this route and then use the box blade across the whole area that I have mucked up to re-level it and re-sod.
Another option is to somehow use this to justify the purchase of a backhoe . Sounds like overkill for digging a foot or so but then I could use it for other things like digging out a couple stumps that are in the front yard. Rebuild a retaining wall some day. For just the landscaping a nice little BX24 sized backhoe looked nice but I would probably just be adding a backhoe to my L3400 - so maybe I could just get a smaller bucket (12-14")?
Any thoughts?
Not planning on doing anything terribly fancy here. The front of the house has a decrepid 2 ft x 30 ft flower bed. I plan to dig it deeper and make it wider and reshape it. The middle of the yard has 10ft x 8ft section which I guess was intended to be flower bed of some sort but has a pile of ugly bushes in it - some are about 6 feet high. Meybe they looked good when they were small but I'd want to get rid of that area entirely probably - pull out the bushes some how, grade and just grow grass over it.
I could go after the digging with a loader/toothbar. Shape out the new flower bed by hand and then get in there with the loader to dig down. Dig around my 'bush bed' to get to the roots of the bushes and then maybe pull them out with a chain or something.
My concern is that I would ruin the rest of the grass with ruts with all the digging. I can sure dig with my loader/toothbar but have absolutely no finesse doing so. One option is that I just go down this route and then use the box blade across the whole area that I have mucked up to re-level it and re-sod.
Another option is to somehow use this to justify the purchase of a backhoe . Sounds like overkill for digging a foot or so but then I could use it for other things like digging out a couple stumps that are in the front yard. Rebuild a retaining wall some day. For just the landscaping a nice little BX24 sized backhoe looked nice but I would probably just be adding a backhoe to my L3400 - so maybe I could just get a smaller bucket (12-14")?
Any thoughts?