A New Way Down

Our landscapers arrived yesterday to start unloading and prepping materials for the newest changes to our slope. These progress photos are for Norris, who is not here to see what's going on.

First, we have a new path to the road, from the deck side of the house down to the dry stream bed -

The photo has an odd perspective, as Cheryl was on the deck looking down. What appears to be a missing step is actually a landing.

The next photo shows what the new steps look like from maybe 2/3rds of the way down looking up. The dirt on the right will be explained in a later photo. The tomato cages at the top of the steps visible in this photo are protecting Cheryl's crop of cilantro from the construction.


And here's where they stopped for the afternoon - very close to the stream bed crossing. The day lilies in the foreground, , a gift from a neighbor, will be moved.


Cheryl can report that the trip up and down between the street and the house is already much improved over what the driveway presents. The real purpose of the steps is to make the trek safer on those occasions where the driveway has ice. We can usually just wait for daylight to melt whatever is frozen, but emergency calls don't wait till the sun shines.

They started weed whacking the perimeter of the wildflower meadow which will get more rhododendron, small native ornamental trees, and pines. We have not given up the idea of a vegetable garden - they are installing a new terraced planting bed for us on the part of the slope that was once logging road and full of multiflora rose. This is what you could see to the right of the steps.

Not really visible at the resolution of these photos are the remaining naturally occurring flame azalea Cheryl rescued the cutting from last week. They are just down the slope from the three white pines in the center rear

This next photo shows the staging of the locust posts under the deck. They will be used to build up the low side of the terraced bed. There's another pile of these at the end of the driveway where they were off-loaded from the truck.



Black cloth in the background will be used to line the locust-post support system for the bed, to prevent the fill dirt from leaking out between the logs.