When we had our road and septic put in on our property, we ended up with a loop for the driveway and the septic in the middle. Our landscaper (Bryan) cleared a flat area and pushed all the excess to the middle where he put the septic. Our land has a lot of limestone shale, especially in the section that was scraped and leveled.
My landscaping goal is to make the area look more composed and natural. The main driveway section is a jumble of large slabs and the septic area is a pile of slabs and dirt. Here you can see a before and after shot of my slab removal and smoothing process on part of the driveway.
All these slabs made me think we could create some sort of rock wall. I started on the driveway, thinking to shore up the right hand side of the incline. I quickly realized I had excess material that I didn’t have anyplace to put.
So I moved over to the septic area, thinking I could fill that area with the excess material. Throughout November, I worked on stacking up the slabs.
By December, I got to some really big slabs and needed to break them apart. So we bought a 3/4″ drill bit and 3/4″ wedge and feather shims. These are used by drilling holes ~3″ apart and ~2″ deep for the wedge and feather shims then hammering the wedges down, cracking the slabs.
This turned out to be quite the learning process about drills. We had a drill. The 3/4″ drill bit fit it, barely. Using it to drill into these limestone slabs stressed the drill pretty intensely but it worked for about 30 minutes and then it slowed down considerably. Turned out the drill bit was for wood. I know, I thought I ordered one for stone but apparently not. The ones for stone had a different head on them meant for different drill types. So we purchased an impact driver and another 3/4″ drill bit meant for stone.
We had been considering getting an impact driver anyhow because it would also be able to handle removing the lug nuts on our tires. These arrived and lo and behold the new bit didn’t fit the impact driver. It was for a SDS drill, which is a specialized drill made for drilling and hammering into stone. We figured an SDS drill was worth purchasing so we could process all the huge slabs of stone we had. In the meantime, we used the new stone drill bit with our regular drill, allowing us to get rid of most of the large slabs in the septic area. We think we damaged this drill. It still operates at ~60%, but eventually we’ll need to replace it.
With all these large slabs split, we were able to complete the wall, level out the top, and clean up all the excess material.
Now we just need to get some plants growing. Luckily when Bryan brought in a load of river rocks to smooth out the drive incline and fill in the area around the septic, he also brought in seeds. We now have several Havard’s Fiddleleaf plants growing in the drive and around the septic area. They’ve been blooming almost the whole time we’ve been here, bringing in lots of insects (I’m planning another post to document/share living things we’ve seen in this region).
The area surrounding the septic now is what I call our “garden” though we won’t really be growing a garden here. I paved over what I think is the leech field and added steps down to our second drain access point. Added a smaller rock wall to shore up the edges around the tank so we can maintain access if we need it but have space for plants around the edges.
This whole area was filled with some big rocks. We brought in some smaller fill from the driveway edge but we might need more to grow plants in these areas. If so, we’ll need to haul that in from some gully/wash either down our ravine or down the road. But I did scatter some of the seeds my dad sent, the Quail and Dove mix which contains grasses and flowers. Not sure it’ll grow before we leave but hopefully it’ll be growing by the time we return next fall.
And the rest looks great!
There’s still a lot of work to be done on the driveway incline, especially now that we have our new SDS drill, but that project won’t be done before we leave.
The tank retrieval, shed organization, and septic area were our main projects this winter. Future plans for the property (aside from my driveway plans) include a rain catchment roof, an outdoor shower, a rock climbing wall, a studio (~30’x20′ max), and a sauna.