Landscaping clean-up - Summer/Fall 2016

As noted, I was too busy with stone work and we needed to get the grounds under some degree of control this year, plus we needed to get the driveway paved as the washouts in big storms was getting to be a major issue.  The work mostly involved regrading some areas for drainage, getting the turn-around circle set up, a couple short stone walls for terracing the hill for some future gardening, and a bunch of landscape rock for edging and borders.

Since I wasn't doing the work, I didn't get a lot of photos of it (I was working on other things...).  So these were taken Late Nov when I realized I didn't have anything and went to write about it here...

Here is a shot from the house garage pad towards the shop. You can sort of see the terraced section on the right of the paved area, in front of the truck.  There is a better shot of that below.  Paving was another huge step this year, which happened in Oct (2016).

This is a look at the turnaround.  Due to the shape of the space, we changed it from a true circle to more of an egg-shape.  You are looking at the narrow end of it.  It made more sense to do this (and move it towards the camera a bit) as it made better use of the space.

Here is the better shot of the terraced section.  This is going to be the veggie garden eventually.  It will need fencing for deer/wildlife, but not sure that will happen next year.  So the veggies may just feed the wildlife next year...  This shot is standing on the drive, just below the truck in the earlier shot.

 Same location, just rotated looking down towards the road.  You can see the rock borders.  These are for support of the roadway and also to slow down the water that races down the hill in a heavy storm.  We used larger rock in a few places like this.  This is 4-9" range limestone (same as all the rock around the place, including the retaining walls).

Earlier (late summer/early fall) I had to do some prep work before the road was paved and the rock was laid in.  We want to put some lights down by the road, and a couple stone pillars around them, so I needed wires run.  I was not ready to run wires, but something had to go in before the rest of the work happened, so I trenched in conduit and ran a pull cord in it.  I ran 2 just to be safe.  Here is the first run.

And the pair of runs coming from the shop and going under a pass-through I put under the driveway when it was first built.  Amazingly I was able to find them again after ~5 years.  Some photos and some luck and I was able to find them with a small excavator.  It goes under the driveway at the very bottom of the pic, where it turns left.

And comes out the other side...

A few weeks before they paved the place, they came out and graded it.  This is the nicest it has ever been, prior to paving.  They have much better equipment for this than I do, and much more experience doing it.  You can see the tractor they were using down in front of the shop, on its way down the hill to load up and leave.  We had a big storm or two between this time and when they paved, so they had to touch it up a bit before paving, but not a big problem.

The landscaping this year was a step above what I did previously, but not fully final.  Several sections are pretty well set now, like the turnaround, but other areas still need work.  The main goal was to get dirt brought in and spread before the driveway was paved, and try to improve some of the obvious drainage flaws I have seen the past 2 years.  No heavy dumptrucks on the new pavement!  So this was a step above my initial efforts during the early construction, but there is still plenty to do outside.  Getting this MORE under control was the main goal, and we did that (with help).  From here it is smaller stuff, so easier to handle.  That's about it for landscaping from 2016.