Now that I’d spent a great deal of time and energy digging a big ass hole in the ground the only natural thing to do was . . . fill it back in! Our city provides free woodchips, the only catch was that we had to take a dump truck full, or about 7 cubic yards. Since I’d already done the math I knew that was about 1.5 more than we needed, but we figured we could put the rest in some miscellaneous areas around the house and garage. We managed to persuade them, and they managed to maneuver their truck into the backyard rather than the front. This certainly saved a lot of hauling.
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They must have used the small truck that day, it turned out that we had exactly the right amount of chips. They also proved to be much easier to move than dirt, within a couple hours we had the whole pile. . .
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. . .moved. . .
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. . . into place.
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As you undoubtedly noticed in the pictures above I had actually completed another little (3 hour) side project before filling in the wood chips. To make things nice and pretty and help keep the chips in place I laid down landscaping timbers around the perimeter. One of the most satisfying parts of the whole project for me was drilling through each one with a half inch bit and pounding in 12 inch spikes to keep them in place.
