Retaining Wall

To get as unobstructed a "solar window" as possible, we built our house built right to the setback line at the north end of our property. This is the highest point, which gives unobstructed sun from the middle of March to the middle of October.

The terrain behind us is bumpy and some earth moving work was necessary to set up the building site. One spot in particular needed a retaining wall to keep erosion down and to provide a raised flower bed-type area. After this shot was taken, I added another course to the top of the wall and extended the wall in both directions. Now it is all filled with good soil and Angel has planted a few flowering plants.

We still need to a lot of cleanup. In particular, the hill to the left of the photo is covered with weeds and scrap lumber. Since we're mostly done with the heating season for this year, I'll probably just re-stack that pile to somewhere else on the property that is less obtrusive.

You can see some of the deer fencing in the backgrounds of these photos. Alan, the guy who helped us with the fence had a great idea to line up the rows of the mesh. This made the fence look finished and neat.

There is still so much to do. This week I did quite a bit of heavy mowing and it's chewed up my knees pretty badly, so I need to take a few days off. Unfortunately I didn't quite finish the mowing, so I'm going to need to tough it out a bit more. We really have too much "meadow" area for me to maintain with the type of mower we own, but right now we can't afford to upgrade anything like that.

Anyway, progress is slow, but measurable. Yesterday Angel planted many more plants that neighbors who are re-doing their gardens gave her. She has had very good luck transplanting most things and we've lost very few.