Glass Hill reconstruction

Glass Hill is the area just to the east of our driveway and it is called such because we have pulled at least a 5-gallon bucket's worth of broken glass and ceramics out of it. Everything from old soda bottles to windows to plates and the like. Our best guess is that it used to be a sort of dumping area for glass waste long before our little subdivision was even a thought. Whatever the case may be, the area is a desolate place. The soil is entirely composed of nasty red clay and it has a tough time growing any vegetation, though some areas fair better than others in this regard.

Last year, we ended up with half a pickup load of dirt left over from some other project and decided to throw it down between the bottom slope of glass hill and the driveway. And thus a plan for a lengthy flowerbed was born. Well, fresh off our vacation and wanting to do some work outside that didn't include the deck, I picked up a load of soil and we set our plans in motion.

We got all the dirt out of the truck and decided that railroad ties would be the best edgers for the flowerbed. We picked up a few of those and got them installed just the way we wanted. On the slope above the flowerbed, we decided on some creeping junipers to help stabilize the slope and filter the runoff. That side of the driveway was already lined with monkey grass when we moved in, so we tried to work with that as we got things put together. Here's a shot of the finished product (minus mulch...soon to come!). The lighter dirt is the stuff from last year.


We've got a few strawberry plants on the near side of the bed and we planted five butterfly weed plants across the front (shown here suffering from planting shock). The junipers are kind of tough to see, but there are four of them across the slope above the back of the bed. And the far end of the bed is anchored by a handful of Iris' that Jessie's grandparents brought us a few years back. The iris' were originally from Jessie's great-granny Barnes' homeplace. That small tree you see just above the bed is our fig tree. The rocks along the end of the bed came from my many-great grandmother's homeplace in Kentucky.


We also took advantage of the good weather and reworked Jessie's iris garden (also on glass hill). These are more of the same iris' previously mentioned. The large stones on the left side are not in their permanent locations, but are stones from the fireplace of the house in which my great grandmother grew up (Kentucky).


This project was a welcome change of pace from the deck-centric work we've been doing a lot of lately. Next weekend, however, it's back to the grindstone on that project!