Digging up the East Lawn

Most of the East part of the backyard has been dug up and rebuilt -- Zone 2, the North bed, the raised garden, the South bed.  So there is a small part left, between the stone wall and the path.  With the Monkey Grass moved out into Zone 2, it is now clear to be dug up and rebuilt.

 Standard stuff.  We start digging, putting the dirt in a pile behind us, and the rocks out to the driveway.  I need to get up to the rock wall all the way to the section near the raised garden.  Parts of this have been dug up before (like the small section right next to fence, and the part over where the Monkey Grass was).

There was an old sprinkler line that kept getting in the way, so I tried to dig along it, to get it out.

This actually seemed like a reasonable line to split the area around the base of the Monterrey Oak tree on the one side, and the more ordinary lawn section next to the rock wall.

And digging next to the tree produced a large number of rocks.

But with a lot of prying and some jack hammer work, I have most of those out, down to "bedrock".

Working on around the base of the tree, I can extend the digging all the way to the section that was dug up when I was extending the water supply over to Zone 3 in the South Bed.

 and then clearing the dirt off the top of this rock shows one very large rock that needs to come out, to lower the rock level and allow plants to grow.

This is mainly an issue of using the jack hammer to fracture the large rock into smaller pieces that I can pry out and roll out to the front.  Split off the one end.

That leaves two larger pieces, plus a lot of rocks the size I can handle.  The rocks are moved out to the front curb.

 And we then break up one of the two pieces.

Leaving just the one piece.

 Which is also broken up into smaller pieces.

And all of these are taken out to the front, leaving a big empty hole to fill back in with dirt.

And with a lot of rock out at the curb to be picked up.