A Little Trail Work

It’s late spring now and the ferns and other perennial plants in the woods are nearly full grown. So the trail that Bennet and I would take is now overgrown with ferns and other things. One plant I was worried might be poison ivy but it’s wild sasperilla. 

The only section that really needs work this year is a section that hasn’t traditionally been a path.  I pulled up ferns and sasperilla and cut down a couple Norway maple saplings and a dogwood.  I also raked leaves and moved some branches.  I still need to cut a path in that log though.

It's lovely to see this beautiful striped jack-in-the-pulpit.

Stonework and Gardening

The fence and arbor are finished, so now it's on to landscaping.  The slope up to the arbor and down to the gate are awkward, so the goal is to make more comfortable walking paths.  This involves shaving off some areas and filling others as well as creating a very small retaining wall/garden edging.  It's still a work in progress.  The picture above is from yesterday, and the picture below is from today.   Bennet unfortunately likes to dig too.

Meanwhile, Alyssa bought a few more plants while scoping out stone.  Three heucherella Dayglow Pink and an astilbe named Maggie Daley.  She also moved around a couple of plants.  It's very dry here and the poor contractor soil is not helping.  Despite the drought, most plants that we planted in the ground made it through the winter.  Some left in pots did not.

Stairs in the Woods

The next section along the path after the new section we built last spring (moving a bunch of boulders and creating stone steps), is a short, steep section leading up to a large, flat boulder.  We thought wooden stairs would be best here.  Colin used mostly reclaimed or leftover lumber for this project.

He built it over two weekends. He built most of the steps and hauled dirt to fill the treads.  We used stones on the side to keep the dirt in place.  The next weekend, Colin finished the bottom two steps.  He also moved some more large stones to build a small retaining wall to create a landing at the bottom of the steps.  Evelyn helped Alyssa plant two non-invasive, native ferns, and they transplanted one Christmas fern from elsewhere.