Author: xfy

It’s gone! Finally all the grass is gone. I’ve still been working on the yard, but mostly with the fiddly little stuff that doesn’t take fantastic before and after pictures. I ended up renting a sod cutter after my neighbors generously offered me the use of their truck. It took a bit to figure out, and unfortunately couldn’t be used on the parts I’d already started removing grass on, but it took out most of the rest of the front yard in less than 2 hours. A bit of a pain if you’re by yourself as you have to roll up a row before you can start the next or everything gets tangled in the cutter. I also now have a massive pile of dead grass in my backyard.

After that I spent Saturday and Sunday just cleaning up all the patches that had been missed. Which took quite a bit of work. I’m working on getting my sod and decomposed granite delivered tomorrow, and still need to work on getting the steel edging to go down hill, but things are actually starting to look like the end is in sight.

So after much leveling finally got to start shoveling stone. This is how it looks after an hour of work this morning. It needs a lot of cleaning up, but it’s definitely starting to resemble something and looking sharp.

On a sad note while hammering in edging this weekend my trusty rubber mallet splintered in two. It was both a gardening and cooking tool as I had used it to flatten many a chicken breast and pork chop. It will be missed. 

Went third round of leveling pavers and got edging in around path. Gonna push to get river rock in the path and remove the rest of the grass.

We went out to Julie’s parent’s land in Evant this weekend. We managed to secure some free river rock, that just requires us to load it into a trailer, and then our neighbor is driving it over to our house. That loading is quite a lot of work, though. We’re probably a little over halfway through and that first picture is how much we’ve done. A lot more work than we were expecting. But Julie and the girls helped.

While in Evant we picked up a bunch of yucca and cactus. Not much variety out there. Obviously grazing has left pretty much only stuff that cows and deer don’t eat. But we brought some back to pot and get ready for the front yard.

This week I’m focusing on leveling the path. I’m work mornings and nights. This project was bigger than I expected. Gotta rent a sod cutter and buy some decomposed granite for this weekend. 

Not a lot of interesting work yesterday. Both my mom and dad came over and helped pull up some grass. We’re now about ¾ done with the South side of the yard. 

So in the spirit of doing landscaping projects, I noticed yesterday that there was a massive dead branch in one tree in the backyard. Last night we had a rainstorm and that tree basically appears to have exploded. It fell apart. So we spent today scrambling to find someone to cut it down. And worrying about the cost. And I moved almost a ton of pavers today. At the end I was cleaning up. We had one extra paver and it completely fell apart while I was attempting to lift it. Lovely cut and bruise on my middle finger. Fun day. But we got a bunch of grass out. We got all the pavers moved. We got some free river rock lined up. Tomorrow I have to level the pavers and move out some more grass.

Spent the morning pulling back out the existing brick border and concrete pavers. I think those pavers were cast in place. They’re super heavy and weighted oddly. The second picture is my boneyard after putting everything back there. The majority of the pavers and yellow bricks on the left came out of the front yard this morning.
This afternoon we’re going to try to get the landscape fabric and new pavers down and start pulling out grass. 

So here is the beginning. This is what my yard looked like when I applied for the City of Austin’s Landscape Conversion Incentive Program. By November 15th I’m expected to rip out all the grass and replace it with something. I cannot plant replacement plants yet.