Front Yard: The Disaster State

From this angle, maybe the yard doesn't look so bad. The photos above and below were taken in April 2019.

But if you look closely, perhaps you'll see that the grass itself is sort of patchy and there's actually a good bit of clover taking over:

Last May and June, I thought I'd just tackle it and set it all straight. As a result, the front yard has been a disaster for a year now.

It began early last spring, after I had aerated and fertilized and realized that it was simply a clover-and-wiregrass monstrosity that would not and could not be healed. Extreme measures were called for, and I decided I would rip out all of the topsoil layers that were infested with those deeply buried nasty invaders' roots and replace it with brand new soil layers.

The first step was to kill everything with Roundup, with a minimum of three spaced applications.

That ended up including a portion of the back yard near the kitchen door as well (shown above).

On the north end of the front yard, I tilled it all...

...and then removed the broken up/loosened soil a wheelbarrow at the time.

But it turns out that way too much wiregrass survived because it needs so little for its root nodules to spawn new growth. That put me back to waiting and killing with Roundup.

As for the south end of the front yard, instead of tilling, I took the flatblade shovel and excavated one scoop at the time. I wanted to go as deep as any of the wiregrass roots seemed to have infiltrated and make sure I got it all out.

I also knew an ongoing barrier to a lush green lawn was going to be the lingering after-effects of the two large trees that had long ago been removed. (I previously blogged about the stump and roots I excavated last summer.)

For the leftside tree that had been removed, even though I had the stump ground up, there was still plenty of rotting base and roots to dig out, and I found that some of that gosh darned wiregrass was living quite extensively and thick, as deep as 12 inches down.

As is so often the case, even with the size and scale of this as a stand-alone project, it becomes an inevitable can-of-worms, and you might say that one of the holes I uncovered was actually a many-passaged rabbit warren. Not literally, mind you, but one thing led to another until I ran out of steam and ran into the blistering heat of July 2019, and all progress stopped for the rest of the year.

So digging up stumps and roots: mostly yes (or so I thought) on the north lawn, and halfway on the south lawn. But then I got into the dilemma of the granite wallcaps on the north end, and that consumed a lot of time (see this blog post).

Remediating that led me into alleviating water and drainage pressures on the wall, so I also dug out a pretty deep trench behind the wall.

And then I discovered a vertical drainline hidden in the northeast corner of the yard.

And that led me down to the busted clay drainpipe at the bottom interior of the retaining wall so I went on a fruitless search for a connector so it could be fixed.

And came up empty so I decided to just build a brick catch basin to connect that northside drainline (from the backyard - see this blog post):

I even pre-cast a top for that drainbox so that I could restore a vertical drain connection as well:

I am even more inexpert at this than you might've guessed but so far it seems to be reasonably functional.

It also seemed like a chance to add in a drain for front yard run-off, but the effectiveness of this will have to wait until I finish rehabbing the lawn...for now, it's constantly getting covered over with eroding ungrassed soil.

I backfilled with gravel all of that area behind the north end of the front retaining wall and then got it covered back over.

Remember how this began as a lawn rehabilitation project? By this time, I'd completely removed shovels-depth layers of soil and I was also thinking about laying sod instead of seeding the lawn. And as long as I'm living in this do-it-yourself fantasy world, and with the yard already dug up, I mean, shouldn't I install an irrigation system? I'd never be as faithful a lawn-waterer as a sodded lawn would require and how awesome would it be to upgrade to an automatic system to preserve, protect, and defend my various landscaping endeavors?

Rabbit hole after rabbit hole after rabbit hole...

So after stripping down all of the north side of the front yard, and just over half of the south side, and repairing the north retaining wall when I damaged it while resetting the granite wallcaps, and excavating behind the wall and reworking the drainlines there and refilling with gravel, and unearthing and digging out the mass of old roots and stumps, and receiving a huge load of topsoil, and starting to plan an irrigation system, and then thinking: Hey, I should get a second water meter dedicated just to landscaping...then the heat and wet and misery of July hit and I was worn out. The disaster state of the front lawn continued unabated all through the fall and winter.

But I have begun my labors on it again, so stay tuned...