Gardening on a small scale

My townhouse includes a very small (~10'x10') backyard. About a third of that is cement and the rest is covered in pea gravel. I've been wanting to do something with it for some time and did some pricing of cement pavers, stones, etc. I decided I wanted to make a small garden at one end and then make a 7'x7' patio with the rest. The pavers were a bit pricey for me right now, but I decided with a little work, I could at least get the garden in before summer. That was my project for this weekend. Here's a before shot of the backyard:


I went to Home Depot yesterday and got some edging stones, a shovel and 2 40lb bags of garden soil. The first step when I got home was to mark out the edges of the garden and then remove about 2-3 inches of gravel from that spot. I decided to just put the gravel on the remaining part of the yard for now. Later, when I get to the patio part, I'll have to come up with another place to move it. Under the gravel was some old landscaping plastic, which I cut out. I turned over and broke up about 6-8" of soil that was under that and removed a bunch of roots, which I think were from the pine bush outside my fence. Here's a pic of the partly done garden:


I installed the edging stones and added the new soil on top and mixed it in with the current dirt. This is what it looked like when I finished last night:


I discovered when I took Logan (my dog) out, that the little edge stones did not mean, "stay out" to him, so I added some decorative fencing to my shopping list for today. This afternoon I went to Walmart and Home Depot and got plants, more soil, decorative fencing, seeds and bamboo poles.
When I got home, I added the two bags of dirt and then started planting. I planted 4tomato plants of 2 varieties. I may have to remove a couple if they all do well, just because of space. I planted two salvia plants in front of the tomatoes and a clematis vine behind them. The clematis has a nice bamboo rod to climb up. I also planted some larkspur and columbine seeds around the edges. We'll see what comes up! The last step was to install the decorative fencing. Here's the final result:




I'll post pictures later in the year - hopefully everything will be doing great.

First mountain hike of the season

With temperatures predicted to be in the mid- to upper-80s, Sherrie and I decided to do a little mountain hiking today. I looked up a few caches up in the Old Stage/Gold Camp Rd area. The first one we went for was near the top of St. Peter's Dome. The trail starts off easy enough, although we could feel the altitude (> 9000ft), since we haven't hiked up that high since last fall. We did some scrambling and took some wrong turns while trying to figure out how to get to the top. The views were spectacular once we made it up. Here's a picture of Sherrie climbing up one of the many slabs of granite on the way:


Here is a fence lizard sunning itself on top:


Pic of me with the view in the background:


After returning from St. Pete's, we drove a little ways back toward town and then hiked about a mile down the closed section of Gold Camp Rd to look for another cache. We found part of the cache, but most of it was gone, probably lost to the elements, since it hadn't been found since last fall. This giant slab of granite was along the way to the cache site:

No excuses

I won't even try to make excuses for why I didn't even get one post in April. I thought about it several times, but never sat down and did it.

Rather than trying to cover lost ground, I'll just start with current stuff. Sherrie and I did some caching and hiking along Fountain Creek Regional Trail last Monday afternoon. We hadn't been on this part of the trail before. It had lots of varied habitat, and there was plenty of wildlife to be seen, including coyote, prairie dogs, and many birds. I identified what was a new species of bird for me, a Lewis' woodpecker. Here are some of my pics:
Coyote

Blue-winged teal

Killdeer

Lewis' woodpecker