Yard Progress

The last couple weekends I’ve been working on finishing the landscaping for another section of my yard.

Before (look along the fence by the gate):
Before

When I started the weekend before last I was only planning to remove some gravel so I could work on the flowerbed edging and retaining wall along the fence. Since I wasn’t planning to do anything major I didn’t think to take a good before picture. Then once I’d removed some gravel I got to looking at it and decided I had enough space to start adding things, and eventually it got too dark to work and I had to stop. This was taken the next day:
After round 1

I was pretty proud of the progress I made, but having loosely retained gravel holding up a few paving stones made it hard to get to the fence-side of the flowerbed. After having to work my way along that side several times assisting Talore in hunting grasshoppers (bonus pictures of this later) I figured I should work on that this past weekend.

I didn’t start with big plans, I was just going to move some dirt/gravel out of the way (again). This was taken when I realized I’d cleared a whole ‘nother segment-worth of space (segments being the width of the weedblock fabric I’m putting down under the gravel):
Before 2

And the after picture from Sunday:
After 2

I tried to line up the pictures so they’d be from the same angle, but it was hard to flip back and forth between them (several other pictures between) so I figured this was good enough. I’m really happy with how it’s progressing, but to do more I’m going to have to decide how I want the end of that flowerbed to be done. I also need to go get more landscaping blocks to go along the fence since I only started with a single row and the wall I’m building with them is two-blocks tall. Hopefully I’ll do more on it this weekend (long weekend for the win), but I’ve got another couple projects I really need to get to that probably should come first.

As promised, a picture of the ferocious hunter and her catch:
Talore with prey
Admittedly she wouldn’t have eaten it (happened shortly after the picture, and boy did it crunch) without my help, but by the time she lost it in the grass it was maimed enough it couldn’t jump and was leaving a trail of goo. I didn’t see any reason to leave it to die and feed the ants, so I dug it out for her.

With how much Talore seems to crave the hunt she sure doesn’t prolong it. Most of the bugs she catches get eaten as soon as she’s managed to stun them so they don’t jump when she lets go with her paws. This one apparently was rather more resilient and led her on a merry chase around my yard in circles (I kept having to untangle the leash from the taller plants).