Grading the Garden

Three out of ten but shows improvement…

Sick of all the weeds we decided to try and put the garden to grass before winter comes. We’ll probably end up digging some of this up for walls, paths, flower beds etc. but all that will probably be years off. This is what we’ve been working on mostly for the past few weeks.

The process started off by getting rid of all the weeds and vines which was a combination of digging, weed killer and flame thrower (think big bunsen burner).

We don’t know how we will want the garden but we thought that having nice flowing contours would be a good start and the first step to doing that is to roughly grade the garden which involves using the soils from humps to fill the dips.

It’s hard work as we have many tons of soil to move which involves shovels and a wheelbarrow. I’d say we are maybe half way there and this is just to the rough grading stage, the fine grading will be another pretty big task. By the end of this I estimate that we will have moved about twenty tons of soil.

So that I could look at our progress when we took a break, I took off the side railing of our rear deck. The whole thing is going anyway and it’s nice to be able to sit back and take stock of the work.

If you look at the string you can see a curve in it and this is the hump we are removing. These photos were taken after maybe three weekends of shoveling and wheelbarrowing and yes it really doesn’t look that different. To cheer us up I added two pictures of what the garden looked like when we bought it.

Last night we met someone who owns a tool hire business in Kingston and we will probably get some heavy duty machinery to finish off the rough grading. This is the earth moving machine we are looking at and we may be able to hire it for a weekend for a few hundred dollars. I bet we can do a lot in one weekend with one of these.

It will be handy to try out something like this as we have to dig out and replace our 130 year cast iron water waste pipe at some point.