Progress on the PE&A has been at a rather slow pace the past two weeks as other outdoor projects have taken precedence. I expect the pace to increase as most everything else in the yard is now done. I've put at least a hundred new plants in the ground, and another hundred in pots. And now, aside from watering, mowing and weeding, I think I'm finally ready to work on the railroad!
In my last post I described the five tons of rock that showed up on the front lawn. Once I had all of those moved back the train area, I then had five yards of fill dirt delivered. So my task now is to arrange all of the rocks and dirt to create the landscape for the railroad.
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| The railroad landscape is starting to take shape as I'm having fun selecting and placing rocks. |
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| Most of the rocks I could pick up, but there were a few larger boulders which were too heavy for me to carry by myself. I thought a sled would work but I don't have a plastic one on hand and I couldn't find a retailer with one in stock this time of year. So I thought I would make a sled out of plywood. This worked, but it took an enormous amount of energy to drag across the lawn. |
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| I realized a better solution was to continue using the wheelbarrow, but as I couldn't lift the heavier rocks into it, I built a ramp and just rolled the rocks in. With this method I had all the remaining boulders in the back yard in no time at all. |
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| The work area in progress. I needed to first remove the existing plants as they're in an area that will be buried. I transplanted most of them to other spots of the yard. |
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| The first rock wall |
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| And the second rock wall with backfilling in progress. |
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| This is another project I've been working on, my piece of Palouse prairie. I'm using flags to help keep track of everything and visualize placement. Pink flags are plants that carried over from last fall. Red/orange flags are new plantings this year. And there are more plants to come—I have about 75 native plant seedlings I started from seed over the winter that will be transplanted later this year once they've had a chance to mature. |
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| And speaking of native plants, I went hiking twice this week and the wildflowers in bloom right now are amazing. Arrowleaf balsamroot is the dominate flower at the moment and you can find entire meadows and hills covered in yellow, as this photo demonstrates. Other dominate flowers right now are common camas and nine-leaf lomatium. |
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| A field of common camas. |
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| I was very excited to come across this rare example of a mostly white common camas. |
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