Yard Maintenance Day

Normally I spend Sundays cutting the grass. But I had a long list of other items to take care of today. I started by working on my car. There were some pieces of plastic hanging down under my car. I used some string and duct tape to secure those pieces to the car. Next I went to the front garden and secured Kit Kat's rose bush. It has been falling over during storms. I staked the thing down with three small stakes. If that does not work, we are going to need to seriously trim this bush.

After that, I worked on the latch to the gate separating the front and back yards. The concrete guys took off the gate to pour the new driveway concrete. When they put it back, the latch would not close correctly. I moved the latch to a new location on the gate. Secured the thing with four little screws. It works like a charm now.

My main chore this day was to deal with some of the erosion in the back yard. I set up a water collector in the ground made of crushed rock. I funneled this to a new PVC pipe in the ground that diverts the water to the bottom of the hill. I reinforced the sides of the pipe with lumber to keep it strong.

Getting Rocks

Our back yard slopes down to a creek at the bottom of the hill. This is nice because all the water runs down to the creek and not into our house. However we do have a problem. The water seems to be washing away our hill.

It is getting so no cats can walk along the back side of our house. The water has washed away the ground. So all that is left is a steep slope. Time for Black Cat to come to the rescue. My plan is to build up a retaining wall to hold up our dirt and form a level path.

So far I have dug four holes, and secured four posts into the ground. I have also nailed up long plywood to form our wall. If I were a slacker cat, I would just pile up the dirt now to form our path. But if the water got stuck in all that dirt, we would have a landslide. Dirt with water is heavy. I need to build up some drainage. So today I bought a couple drainage pipes, and a bunch of crushed rock.

At first I thought I would need the store to fill my truck with the rocks. However I found out from my bro cat that they sold crushed rock in small bags. That was perfect. All this cat and his truck could carry was 10 bags today. That should make for a good start. Tomorrow I might return and buy another 10 to 12 bags of rocks. I will take some pictures when I make more progress on my work.