Lots of hard work

My dad flew down from Colorado during spring break to help me landscape the backyard. I took a whole week off of work, and we got busy. As you can see here, there is a whole lot of brown dirt, and nothing else. On Monday and Tuesday, we took a few trips down to a rock quarry and loaded up 5,000 pounds of boulders to create a rockwall along the back.

Little by little, the rocks turned into, as my dad calls them, "rockeries." We took a lot of breaks, shown above, because those boulders are frickin' heavy, and we are out of shape. We built some planters in the corners and made the rockwall along the back to add some color and texture.

Bailey supervised our work very closely. After 9-11, one cannot be too safe. So she and Little Man were careful to sniff every boulder for bombs. They often made the boulders their own, if you catch my drift.

For the next step on Wednesday, we dug out lines for a sprinkler system, pretended like we new what we were doing when putting the valves in, did a whole lot of measuring, and finally buried the lines where they should be. Believe it or not, the system actually works.

The first dump truck arrived on Thursday. It left 5 cubic yards of topsoil--really just AZ dirt mixed with steer manure. Several hours later, 5 inches of topsoil covered 500 sq. ft. of a lawn bed.

The second dump truck came on Friday. It dumped 5 tons of decorative rock by the side of our house. Friday was spent with shovels and wheelbarrows. The dogs added their own topdressing.

Saturday we rested. In one week's time we dug holes and ditches, placed 15,000 pounds worth of rock, spread a huge mound of topsoil, installed an irrigation system, and even squeezed in a little home teaching. The curbing people come today to make the division between rock and grass. All that's left is to lay the sod, but that isn't coming for another 10 days. I can't wait until it's all done.