Back Yard Rehab

Eliminating the Bad Grass

While it took two summers to rehab the front yard, I only got around to doing a similar—but much less involved—project with the small sqaure-and-strip of the back yard this past summer. It is a short distance from the rear wall of the kitchen to the property line, because I pushed the boundaries of the kitchen addition project up to the zoning set-back limit of 20 feet.

An historical perspective of the back yard's transformation since I bought the house in 2003 can be found in this blog entry. In the last few years, I've also reduced the lawn portion of this area by putting a narrow landscaped strip up next to the house and converting the steeper-sloped back corner to shrubs, bushes, grasses, and trees.

One of my quarantine task jar projects back in the spring was to rework the northside drainage near the HVAC units and to try to mitigate the standing water in the main drain field. The narrow path beside the kitchen table bay has always been a bit weedy. I'd also seen an aggressive infestation of wire grass near the grilling section of my meager patio pad.

Top Soil Dump, Spread, and Pound

Once I decided to bring the irrigation system to the back yard area, I knew I was committed to a solid upgrade of the yard there. It took multiple applications but I killed all the grass and weeds. I faithfully dug my trenches and laid grass sprinkler lines, landscape area lines, and a third line to go around the parking area to service the narrow southside strip along the driveway. I installed a three-valve manifold and wired it to manage these areas on an automated irrigation schedule.

Freshly Seeded

Once the lines were laid, I built up and sloped and leveled the yard with my fresh good topsoil mix. I got it seeded in late summer and scheduled the sprinklers accordingly.

The back yard growth, like the front yard, took about 8 days to really begin sprouting...

Grass Sprouting and New Sprinklers

Continued Grass Growth

...and by the end of the fall growing time, a lot of the grass was nicely filled in but also looked, well, adolescent still. Bringing irrigation lines to the back yard also allowed me to add a yard hydrant back there as well:

New Yard Hydrant

And I am pretty pleased the the resulting expanse of green lushness, shown here last week: