With our new house, we have the opportunity to do anything we want with our garden. We are starting from scratch, just bare hard clay. With such a blank slate, it is difficult to know where to start.

Sierra Home Architect 3D was such a success with the design of our home, so I thought I would try out Sierra LandDesigner 3D as well. The good news was that it is far less buggy than Sierra Home Architect 3D.

Version1

This is one of the early plans for our garden.

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This was fun and pretty much enabled us to place major things like the play area and the vegetable garden. It also gave some pretty good 3D views. Here is the view from the front:

You can see we have already got Keiran's tree, and our 12 ton boulder into the design. Even at this stage, we planned for a garden around the boulder, but it didn't make it into the design yet. If you look closely, you can see the mound in front of the living room window. The program does

Here is the view of the back:

Once again, you can see the key items; the deck, patio, big pine tree, play area and vegetable garden. With a lot of work, I got our mounds modelled, but gave up on them soon after this because the program kept dropping stuff into the mound, where it disappeared from the 3D view.

Version 2

I did this after we had finalized more of our plans, and was getting ready to install the sprinkler systems. The program does support this, although not as well as it could.

The actual deck is modelled correctly. The big pine tree which was in our original plan had been taken out of the design for 5 months when it was chopped down (another story), has now been put back into the design when we acquired an even better tree! The big boulders in the back yard have been relocated to a central position.

The new view of the front yard:

The Manchurian Ash which the city provides in this area has been added and the garden/shrub area marked out.

The back view makes it more obvious that the mounds are gone. It is a pity, they are actually a fairly major part of our landscaping and this silly program can't hack it!

The Real Work

Some of the landscaping decisions were done early on. For example, I specifically chose a lot with some grade (sloped down towards that back of the lot). This enabled me to have large basement windows (3 ft.x 4ft.) at the back of the house.

August 12: The real work began while the house was still being built, before we even moved in. One day, Sandy was talking to the construction crew (who were installing water mains in the adjactent division) and got a bunch of boulders dropped into our front yard. We like big rocks!

Some neighbors walked by and volunteered a wonderful 12 ton rock that had been dug up when their basement was being excavated. We said "Yes, please", and our construction crew went off to get it... and failed. It wouldn't fit into the bucket. They promised to come back the next day with some forks instead. We promised to meet them with more beer. The 12 ton boulder was delivered and everybody was happy.

Ken was very cautious bringing it down the street. For a good reason it turned out. It was so heavy, the front end loader overbalanced when putting it down. The back end flew up 5 feet in the air. If this had happened while he was going down the street, it would have put a BIG dent in the road.

September 26: Three days before we moved in, the final grading for the lot was done. We were lucky in that we had had huge amounts of rain which had already sunk the back-filled areas. Lots of our neighbors spent a lot of time pumping water into the ground to accomplish this. Ours dropped a foot to 2 feet all on its own, BEFORE the final grading. Here you can see the driveway agregate and our little mound in front of the living room window. The big boulders had to be moved to one side and then back again. By chance, their final configuration was just what we wanted.

Much more work was done in the back yard. To get as good a view as possible out of the basement windows, I had the center portion of the yard scraped down. To make it interesting, I had two huge (4 feet high) berms extend down the yard on each side. Sandy dislike this look... said it looked like we were in the trenches.

April 5: Now we fast forward to April 2001. Winter has come and gone, and nothing has changed. This is what we have to work with.

And the view of the back. You can see the large berms rising on each side.

I started building my deck in early April. It was cold, rarely much above freezing, frequently well below. I learned to use tools wearing insulated gloves. Chris helped me dig the first 3 holes for the deck. We went down 3 feet no matter what. This is only half of what is recomended for this area, but I have my limits... and some common sense. On two of the holes, we struck rock. Not just the little 4 to 6 inch rocks, but 12 to 18 inch rocks, weighing about 100 pounds. In one hole, we had to dig down 2 feet to get at the 100 pound rock, which was blocking our access to the other 100 pound rock, which was in the way of our hole. Instead of a nice 6 inch diameter hole, we had one which was over 2 feet in diameter! In retrospect, it would have been fine to just put the posts in, and concrete them to these boulders. This photo is from upstairs, looking down on the deck after 2 weeks of work.

April 22: Deck is coming along. My stubborness in building a different deck, with curved rails has more the tripled the amount of time this should take. But I am pleased. It will be unique. It is about 5 degrees, but that is fine when you are working hard.

April 29: While I continued to work on the deck, Sandy found herself shovelling river pebbles. Seven cubic yards of them, from the front yard, to just around the corner.

May 3: A gift from the heavens. Sandy's aunt Sally was going to cut this tree down, so we gave it a good home instead. It cost $300 to move it, but would have cost $2000 to buy one like it. You don't really get a concept of how big it is until you look at the guy at the controls. The spades are 10 feet long, and make a hole 7 feet wide and 6 feet deep. The tree is about 24 feet tall, and at the upper limit for Lyle's machine, which is the biggest one in town. Funnily enough, Lyle said that the heaviest part was the big clay plug that he took out of our ground and dropped onto Sally's lawn. It took about 4 hours for us to shovel it into the hole.

Work on the deck continued. I am very proud of the built-in benches. Keiran's pretty cute too!

June 3: Here is the final deck, surrounded by the river pebbles. I had to sit on the neighbors fence to get this picture.

June 6: We had a bobcat running around for three hours reshaping our berms and moving our boulders. We had the glacier-grooved one set up as a bench, and the red one set up like a monolith. Looks pretty neat. The boulders were well past the limits of the bobcat, 2000 pounds max. The big one, about 13,000 pounds was moved by dragging one end at a time. It did manage to stand the 5,000 pound one up on end okay.

The topsoil arrives. 22 cubic yards.in this load. We had 56 cubic yards. It took the bobcat an additional 3 hours of scurrying around to get it distributed and levelled. The driver was fun to watch, very quick and "one-with-the-machine".

June 10: Lets learn how to install sprinklers in the small front yard. Actually lots of fun, a lot like Tinker-Toy or Lego! The digging in the rock hard clay (impregnated with crushed gravel) was NOT fun though.

June 14: Front yard is done, on with the back yard. Here I am at the end of a 30 foot ditch. I have 2 feet to go... So, I run into a 2 foot boulder, dead center and it has to come out. This is Keiran dancing on it. I am still digging around trying to find out how big it really is... (turned out to not be as bad as expected, it was only the top half of a boulder which had been sheared off or something).

June 24: We went out and bought our shrubs for the front yard. Looks pretty neat, and will be REALLY neat when we finally have grass. This photo makes it look a lot greener than it really is.

June 26: Still working on the sprinklers in the back yard. Here are the two new cedars in front of our big White/Colorado Spruce. In the background you can see the Meewasin Grasslands. Keiran helped us a great deal with his trucks and bulldozer.

July 7: Bubbler in the cedars. Sprinklers are all done, at least for now.

July 12: Our sod arrives! The day is perfect for laying sod: 20 degrees and drizzling. The drizzle and mist kept up for almost the whole day and helped keep the sod from drying out.

Sandy ran off to get a lawn roller, and by the time she got back, I had almost finished the front yard. Pretty quick and satisfying. In spite of the drizzle, I turned the sprinklers on as soon as possible to get everything soaked.

We had some fun doing the backyard with the slopes. You want to sod layed across the slope, but our complex slopes required a little more thought.

By 9 pm everything was done. It was a long day, but felt like it went quickly. Yes, we still had another hour and half of daylight left. Nice long days here in the summer. Once again, sprinklers on as soon as possible. Actually, I had them on several times while I was laying the sod. Working hard enough to stay warm.

We still have lots of exposed topsoil. Good topsoil. Weeds love our topsoil. Here is Sandy weeding the garden. Yes, those are the weeds, about 2 1/2 feet high. Our neighbors sprinklers water our future vegetable garden pretty thoroughly.

August 21: Trees! Three new trees. A Schubert Chokecherry and two Tower Poplars. Right now they look like twigs but one day...

August 27: Another tree! This one is a Harvest Gold Linden. And changes my plans for the back yard. I was putting all the trees along the sides, but Sandy really wanted this one right in the middle. Should be pretty neat, but I hope it doesn't ruin our view when it gets huge. Finally finished planting it late in the evening.

September 16: Still building the wall around the patio. And some really neat steps going up. This is Mom and me admiring the steps.

September 29: Finally finished off my walls. This is the wall around the play area. Eventually it will contain a teeter-totter and ???. We are planning on a pea-gravel base.

Getting closer to finishing off the garden wall. Had a big 600 pound rock that made a neat seat so I built that into the wall as well. Keiran is standing on it. Eventually the wall will wrap around behind the big Spruce.

*****

We had a bizarrely warm September. So I delayed draining the sprinklers. Thursday 27 September broke all records. 32 degrees Celcius. But, 8 days later, I rode to work in -12 degrees. It looks like the undergound sprinklers survived the freeze up, but I have drained them now!

*****

Whew! That is pretty much it for 2000. Next year we have to lay the brick patio, the brick driveway and build 2 fences. And more shrubs and mulch.

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Email me! warren.long@shaw.ca