Fence work for the West Lawn

After laying out the rough river of rocks, we can see the other areas of the West Lawn that need work.  One is the fence line from the pool of blue rocks up to the corner of the fence.  We have had a continuous problem of bamboo coming under the fence from the neighbors and popping up in what should be our lawn.  The lawn does not actually grow, probably due to the heavy shade from the fence, the oak tree, and the jungle.

To solve this, and make this side of the yard well-defined, we are going to do the same "dig down to bedrock, pour a cement wall, and top it with a layer of limestone" that we have done on almost all of our other fence lines.

As we dig, we are finding a large number of bamboo roots, and are pulling those out.

As is normal for our back yard, we dig down a foot or two and we hit solid rock.

We have to be careful as we dig -- the French drain runs next to this in the lawn.

Once we have about half of this section dug up, we can frame it for concrete.

And then pour the concrete.

 Move the forms down.

And pour the second part of this first section.

Then the third part.

Rain and cold weather slowed down this work, but after pouring this third part of the fence wall, we continued digging.

and continued.  Rain and cold weather slowed us down, but we have it completely dug out.

We can then pour the last section of the concrete wall.

giving us a continuous wall of concrete down to bedrock along this entire section of fence.

Now we put the white limestone blocks on the top of the cement wall, to give it a finished look.

And then we can put the dirt back in the ditch.

This entire process -- from starting the digging, pouring the concrete, putting the stones on top, and filling in the digging -- took about two months.

Rough Layout of The River of Rocks

The East Lawn now seems done, so we turn our attention to the West Lawn.  The plan says this is dominated by the River of Rocks -- a "path" of flat rocks running from the fence gate around to the back patio walkway.

We have been putting aside all the flat rocks that we've found while we were digging up the rest of the yard and just storing them on the West Lawn area.

There is so much shade in this area that there is little (if any) lawn there.  We have an area near the front of Liriope that we moved from the front beds (since it was being eaten down to the ground by deer).

So the task at hand is just to move the rocks around, trying to fit them together, like a very large jigsaw puzzle, to form the "River", and run it around to the patio walkway.  This takes a couple of days.