Friday, November 18, 2016

Digging up the Central Backyard

The East side and West sides are pretty well done now, so it's back to the central part of the backyard.


We have mainly been using the backyard as a staging location for the materials for our work -- piles of dirt, rock, and mulch.  But it is time for it to be the main focus of our work.

Our plan is to dig from the West and go down a couple of feet, mixing the dirt with more organic material as we put it back in place after removing the rock.

We begin at the edge of the work on the River of Rocks, first making sure that we know where the main irrigation water supply line is.



and then we continue removing the dirt from the layer of rock along this front.



and more digging.


and more digging.



This will continue for a while.  Let's see if a video can show what we do.

 

 Eventually, we dig all the way to the wall around the Jungle.


and then we start removing the rock, putting it up on the lawn, to expose ... more rock!


We can use the pry bar to separate out some of the larger pieces of rock,



but we will need the jackhammer to make them into small enough pieces that we can manage.  A day of work with the jackhammer:





followed by a week of moving rock and cleaning up the debris:




yields a new lower level for the yard and a yard full of large rocks which we will need to get rid of: