Spring 2018

This year we started a big project, fencing the hillside and planting trees and bushes. We are also working on a couple of retaining walls. The reason is that with the goats on the hillsides they eat almost everything and we were starting to fear the hill sliding. The first thing we did was put up a temporary fence.

This was actually phase two of this project, planting the hillside. Very hard to see but we planted several Redwood trees, several Nobel Fir trees, some currents, service berries and a few other misc. things.

The very first part of this project was starting a fence down by the shallow well, and continuing up along the bottom of the hillside. This particular picture is up the fence a ways, looking up hill.

This next picture is looking down to where we first started the lower fence project. the first 3 posts in the picture had water in the bottoms of the holes when we dug them.

This picture is at the bottom where we put a walk through gate. You can also see the old shallow well way down at the end.

another pic. of the upper hillside.

The first retaining wall we did was about sixteen feet from the one going right next to the chicken coop flat. behind this wall we laid stepping stones in a level pad for a water tank to sit on without being punctured by a rock.

 This tank will be for irrigation when done. There is a drain just on the downhill side of the driveway, which will have the pipe extended and emptied into the tank. we will also pipe the outlet down along the hill so we can gravity irrigate items in the terraces we are planning.

 We later started on a retaining wall just below the flat the chicken coop is located on, as this hillside was washing away pretty badly.

These posts will be continued down alone the hill about another six to eight posts at four foot apart. This should stop the hill from washing and give us an area we can terrace and plant fruit trees and other garden stuff. I should mention that the soil will be filled to the top of the six by sixes, and the top four by four posts will be lag bolted to the top of the six by sixes and have stock panels attached to them. Needless to say we have a lot to do with this particular project, and will update later.

Well  this update is being made in December of 2019, finally got to work back on this project again with quite a bit of progress. We now have the retaining wall down eve with the big stump and have a corner for the water tank to sit into, and it is partially back filled.

 The wall ended being five two by twelves high and the ends are staggered so as to afford better strength. the weirdness of the second post from the current end is due to having to place the post out from our wall line roughly six inches due to one of the roots of that old Fir Stump.

 We plan on putting another lower retaining wall out a little from where the soil drops down now.

 We are also planning on extending the wall on down past the chicken coop, and in order to do this we need to extend the drain for the coop floor out past the wall.

 The goats are very curious about the wall, they used to be able to run up and down this hill side.

The corner makes the wall stronger and is a good place to have the water tank sit.

 As can be seen in the pictures we lined the wall with about four layers of ten mil plastic.

There is still a lot of back filling to do.

 This is still a project in progress with much yet to be completed.

It will be nicer once the water tank is pushed back into the corner.