The Anderson estates, home of Little Chief Rocky Valley, has a backyard plan. It is on a slow but irregular schedule. This spring, one of our backyard projects was a retaining wall.
Our backyard is very rocky and has a non-trivial slope. As a result, the little soil and grass we have gets washed away very easily. Our project plan was to build a retaining wall about halfway down the yard, where our old addition juts into the backyard. The hope is to interrupt the slope so that the yard has a chance to retain some grass. The midway of the end of the house seen in the pic below is about where we wanted the wall to land.
Tons (probably literally) of heavy rocks were dry stacked. The yard sloped from the top of the yard down, but also pitched in towards the house as it went. The rock wall ended up being about knee high at the house, tapering down to about 6-8 inches out in the yard.
Since I was dry stacking and not digging a footing, I got the largest rocks I could feasibly move as my bottom course. I backed up smaller rocks on the inside face of the wall to avoid having a completely vertical wall. I also put up parallel row of rocks about 5′ up the slope to act as a speed bump for the shear weight of the soil I was bringing in.
Where did I get those rocks? The rocks came from our yard and coyote woods. I got a few rocks from a neighbor (we have a lot of rocks around here). A few last rocks I went and picked up out of a ditch.
With the rocks done, I started bringing in top soil, 1.5 cubic yards at a time. I’d spread it and pack it down as much as possible. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. I haven’t made my final tally, but I think it was about 15 yards of soil I ended up using. This is probably halfway through bringing in dirt:
Eventually the dirt was done and sod was brought in:
Added a couple plants and rerouted some gutters:
So far, so good. We have had a couple torrential spring rains which exposed some holes in my wall. Rocks, smaller rocks, pea gravel to the rescue. Soil was repacked and everything seems to be a going concern.
