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From commentor & determined homespace remaker StringOnAStick:

Here’s a project I completed this year that I think came out quite nicely and is my last major hardscaping project for this house.

We moved in here just a bit over 4 years ago and in that time I have transformed every bit of the reasonably large lot, from sadly neglected lawn (which we were never going to keep; this is high desert and having that much grass is obscene, though sadly common here) and some badly constructed raised beds fully invaded with with lawn grass, so the best bet was to just start over. My last project was this one: getting rid of the huge painted pine (?!) deck and having a smaller area of pavers installed so I’d have more planting area. I then realized I needed to install some flagstone to get from the paver area down to the main pathways, plus use the local basalt to shore up the edge of the pavers and the paver steps once that work was completed by the paver pros. Who says landscaping isn’t something you figure out as you go along, realizing what problems need to be solved?

(My husband isn’t into gardening or landscaping, so this is my deal. He will help when I need large amounts of material moved and he did help me move some bigger rock after I crushed/broke my finger tip in a flagstone handling accident late in that phase of this project.)

My goal was to complete this project before the summer heat hit and this kind of hard labor just wasn’t going to be much fun if I didn’t beat the heat.

The photo below is of what I had been wanting to get rid of since we moved in here. The ugly green painted pine deck was a huge waste of space, with peeling paint but not rotten wood , so I deconstructed it and gave it all away on Craigslist to a local small farmer. There were little poured-in-place concrete disks that the foundation sat on that I had to dig up and haul away, all 60 of them, plus 14 properly set-in-concrete posts from a deck addition that had to be dug out and hauled away as well. I’m thankful for our wonderful neighbor (and very close friend, now known to all as my “garden husband”) and his pickup, or else I would have done a lot of trips to the landfill in my Prius. (The Prius often gets used as my truck, but I’m trying to limit that because it’s got a lot of miles on it and I want it to last long enough that I can find a used plug-in or full EV at some point.)

The next task was to make the existing bed on the edge of the old deck bigger, which meant in addition to more pollinator perennials, I could plant a peach tree and a pear, both of which will be kept at under 6′ tall using the “Grow a Tiny Fruit Tree” method. The second photo is looking in the same general direction as the first photo, and at the newly extended rock wall that was built to contain more soil and make this bed bigger than it originally was. The yellow pathway material is decomposed granite, a locally popular material that is compacted into place and is a reasonable and affordable choice here since flagstone is quite expensive due to the distance it has to travel to get here. That’s also why the raised beds throughout the yard have all been built with the irregular chunks of basalt, because if there is one thing central Oregon has a LOT of, it’s chunks of basalt! I got most of it free online but the last bits I’ve had to purchase so I could get stuff with lichen and that is nicely weathered to dark gray for aesthetic purposes. After building all these raised beds with odd shapes, I’ve gotten pretty good at “seeing” what can fit with what and then digging a bit to seat each stone, and then interlocking it all with smaller bits. Every raised bed in our yard can have people walk on the blocks because they are safely wedged together and quite stable.

With the pavers in, my own rock work building new beds, and the drip irrigation system installed, I started planting. The third photo is early days after the initial planting efforts. Everything except the peach, pear, grape, and the rose I succumbed to (the garden husband got me going on roses, so I bought a David Austin Barrett Browning) are all low water use plants, so the irrigation system installed slightly below the mulch level is configured to provide more water to the peach, pear, grape, and rose. The beauty of a drip system placed slightly below grade is you get very few weeds because the surface isn’t being sprinkled or damp; it is very dry here in the summer so once the spring damp period is over, that’s the end of having weeds sprout. (Here’s a hint for you budding drip irrigation people: take photos before you bury your drip lines under mulch, and only use 1/2″ tubing in your landscape because the 1/4″ stuff is only recommended for use in pots now because it comes apart way too easily compared to the connections made with 1/2″ or 3/4″ tubing, and you don’t realize it’s a problem until you have plants die because they lost their irrigation supply to a random rake or shovel.) Because our entire yard is drip irrigated now, we use about 30% of what a standard lawn grass yard requires here.

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Sunday Morning Garden Chat: High Desert LandscapingPost + Comments (57)