More landscaping

Scot's work at our site is almost finished. He's been there for about two weeks, and the place has under gone a dramatic transformation. He's finished the septic system and put top soil and grass seed on our new mound. He's roughly leveled and smoothed the rest of the area which will be our back and front yard. He dug out an area beside the house for Julie's garden, and gave us a big load of manure/compost to get it started (we already have a pair of tomato plants and a pair of pepper plants growing).

We had to have him remove several trees from around the site. We had three hemlocks that had come down in the back woods, and a two cherries from last summer when we had the site cleared. We also had 5 giant pine tree removed that we worried were too close and leaning towards the house (after the lightning incident). Scot loaded all the timber into his dump truck and took it to the sawmill for us. In a few days we'll get back a stockpile of lumber that we'll let dry and use to make cabinets, bookshelves, etc. Pretty cool.

He's going to finish our retaining wall/stairs today, then he'll be done. The retaining structure looks amazing. Yesterday we helped him lay the stone step and a secondary wall that runs along the stairs back up towards the house. This formed a trianglular wedge of earth in front of the sun porch that is terraced a couple times with smaller stone and will be used for flower beds or whatever.