So, instead of waiting for those to get ready, I'll just skip forward to NOW and show what I've been doing this summer. I'll still get to those background posts (someday), but this way I keep the blog somewhat up-to-date.
In this short series I'll be describing two projects. The first is the creation of a pond/stream/waterfall feature, which in F scale terms represents the river in the upper Arkansas River Valley. The second is the creation of a bridge/pathway that will be necessary to access and enjoy the garden railway. I'm tackling these two projects first as they railway and rest of the garden will be built around them.
For reasons that I'll describe in one of those future posts, we decided to start the outdoor layout in our front yard, and I decided that the focus of that portion of the layout would be Leadville, CO (per my previous post). This is a picture of the front yard shortly after we moved in back in late 2005:
The picture was taken from the end of the driveway. The driveway splits, going off to the right toward the garage, and to the left, where it circles back down to the street. The "front yard" is the area immediately in front of the house, bordered by the driveway.
As you can see, we're in a forest. Not all of the trees shown in that picture survive today. We took away several near the house as part of a "fire mitigation" program (we're in a "firewise community") in 2008, and also lost three big ones in the huge spring storm of April, 2006:
The original owners had set up the front yard area as a sprinkler-fed lawn supplemented with a few non-native aspens and firs, plus several rock-bordered patches where tall pine trees stood in a bed of mulch. The natural slopes were controlled in a few places with a rock walls, none taller than 4 feet.
The front yard did not keep up it's presentable appearance due to our neglect. First, we have never turned on the sprinklers, leading of course to a deterioration of the lawn. This was expected -- we always have planned to replace the lawn "someday". Second, the main concrete walkway into the house was already showing signs of erosiondue to poor installation when we bought the house, and it got steadily worse. Here is how things looked in this August 2007 photo, taken from near the porch steps:
That particular photo was taken as one of a series of "before" photos as part of my 2007 house-painting project. This next picture is an "after" photo, showing the house in the late fall of 2007:
I spent much of early 2008 on other projects, including fire mitigation work. Then, after a long time spent struggling with a design for the outdoor layout, I started work on the outdoor layout. The first project was to get rid of the eroding concrete sidewalk in the front. I started this in late 2008, and by early 2009 it looked like this:
Not a lot of progress, I know. It did take a long time with the jackhammer to break up the sidewalk, as the concrete was 12" (and more) deep, but the real problem was I was struggling with exactly how to move forward with the layout. I had a general plan then to create a pond, stream, and waterfall in the front yard. So I decided to use the pieces of broken concrete to help create the "fill" around the future pond, which explains all the white "rocks" you see in the picture above.
But I'd never built anything like a pond/stream/waterfall, so I tended to find other things to do instead of work on the outdoor layout. Alas, as the picture above shows the front yard had become quite an eyesore, so my wife said I had to do *something* about it. I agreed.
I read what I could on the topic and found two sources of information I'll recommend. One was a series of articles in Garden Railways, starting in April 2004, by Jack Verducci. Garden Railways frequently has how-to articles on water features, and I read all of them dating back to 2000, and each one was interesting. But Jack has been building garden railways and water features for a very long time and his articles provide a depth of experience not available elsewhere.
Of course, Jack's articles describe one method, his, and his focus is solely on building scenery for railways. As great as that is, I sought a more general perspective on garden water features and IMHO the best I found was carried by Lowe's: Complete Guide to Water Gardens by Kathleen Fisher. I did buy a few other books, but this one really superceded all the others.
Looking at these two sources a couple things stood out. First, as with all such projects, you can only learn so much by reading. Until you do it and get a tactile sense of the materials involved and how they go together, you can't really act with confidence. You just have to try a step, assess, and correct mistakes as you go. Sometimes you have to plod ahead hoping that end result will be fine, but not really being sure. In that case it's best to try to arrange contingencies, in case you have to do some repairs later. I'll illustrate this principle with examples as I describe my progress.
The second thing which stood out is that while the water feature industry has evolved to the point where there are standard methods for doing everything, if you want the water feature to look like a scale model you'll have to go outside those standard methods. This is where Jack's series of articles so was helpful.
So, armed with this book knowledge, I started the project for real. Well, as I noted earlier, the months of April, May and most of June were taken up with forest maintenance tasks, but by mid-June I started digging out the stream and filling in the area around the pond. I intended to follow the method Jack described, so I used his article to calculate the size of the stream I wanted, to match the width of the Arkansas River around Salida. The stream bed has to be dug wider and deeper that what you intend it to look like in order to account for the material that will be used to fill it. I started the digging process by using some cheap spray paint to identify the borders of the stream and pond, then started digging, moving the dirt via wheelbarrow from the streambed to the areas around the pond. This took a few weeks, working a few hours on most days.
This next photo is taken on July 20 of this year, and my son Daniel was busy tamping down the dirt around the pond (yes, he was paid):
I was very concerned about the idea of simply dumping dirt over those concrete blocks and trying to create a solid walking surface. I'd read in various books I have on building patios (yes I have a very large home improvement library from past projects) that you can create a solid platform using a tamping tool, then wetting the dirt and doing it again until it's solid. However, I wasn't sure this would actually work until we did it. Fortunately, the process works just fine. The next two photos show the pond and stream area after tamping and filling were done and we were ready for the next step:
In order to make the pond walls even we, of course, used our 7' level. This tool is essential for these kind of outdoor construction projects, and I frequently make use of it on the indoor railroad as well.
The only challenge was finding enough dirt for fill. The streambed provided some, but in order to get the rest I dug a "cut" near the side of the house where I will someday, hopefully next year, put in the rail line that will connect Leadville in the front yard to Salida in the back.
You'll notice in the second photo that we'd also extended the blue/red rock wall along the driveway to account for the new pond. We were able to do this because there were a lot of excess rocks available after we removed the rock borders that we won't need with the new garden design. We still have a pile of excess wall rocks that I intend to use *somewhere" before this is all done.
So that takes us to July 21. The next post will cover the building of the water feature up until the exciting day we started actually running water.
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