Happy New Year!

A new year, a new decade!  Everyone is talking about resolutions today.  I hate resolutions.  I never follow through with them, mostly because I've always gone with the typical self improvement-type goals.  Lose weight, exercise, save money, blah, blah, blah...never gonna happen.  I love food, I hate regimented exercise, and I've never met a bargain I could resist.  That said, I've decided on a resolution that is attainable for me - my tiered garden project.

So here is the space before.  It's a small slope from the main yard down to the barn area.  The house well sits at the top, so we needed to clear this area to put in a water line from the well to the new barn.  No, we didn't actually clear it, that took a machine!

 

The water line was started at the hydrant in the new barn, then a trench was dug toward the existing well.

Once the water line reached the well, the plumber connected it and the area was back filled.  You can see how bony this land really is!  This is the base for my tiered gardens?  Boy, do I have my work cut out for me.

I asked the excavator if he could possibly create shelves in the dirt using his bucket by driving it down into the dirt and dragging the material outward.  He didn't want to do that because of the water line; even though it's four feet underground, the dirt covering it is needed as a protective layering.  Instead, he took some of the topsoil that had been graded off the barn site and dumped it in rows on the bank.  What a perfect solution!

Because I was preoccupied with finishing the barn, I didn't get to work on this area before everything started to freeze up.  In the spring, I'll rake the piles into "shelves" and set up my raised beds.  This will be primarily for my perennials, so I need to make a list of my plants and plot out the beds.  I hope to incorporate the old cast iron bathtub that spent most of its life as a hay trough for the horses and give it a new purpose as a funky raised bed.  I'm thinking of actually building it into the bank somewhere.  I also need to decide how best to brace the topsoil so it doesn't wash away down the bank.  I could use the abundance of stones that are on hand to build retaining walls for each bank, but dry laid stonework on that scale seems daunting.  I'll be researching the easiest, most inexpensive option in the meantime.  Spring needs to hurry up and get here!