Ideas for increasing access to front slope?

[laohaire]

I live in a (small) mountainous region, and steep slopes are the norm here for yards. In fact, it's extremely common to see people mowing their lawns by tying a rope to their lawn mowers and standing there while lowering and pulling up the mower on the rope!

Anyway, we have a large amount of square footage in our front yard that is kind of unsable to us because it's so steep. We are working to change it so it's growing something other than grass. However, I don't feel that comfortable planting and weeding and such on such a steep slope.

My idea was to place stepping stones of some sort in various places. I wouldn't want/need a full path, but just random spots that I can "hop" over to and stand on to access the vegatation in that area. That's enough for me.

But, since it's a slope, I'll have to dig out a divot. There will be a good amount of "vertical" dirt over the stone, if I'm making any sense. What do I do with that? Ideally I'd want to cover it with some material (another stone?) to prevent something from growing there, because otherwise it will just grow right over the stepping stone. I'm also thinking weeds would take over that area because I don't see myself planting regular plants in vertical dirt, kwim?

Am I thinking about this the wrong way? Ideas?

[JamieCatheryn]

First thing that popped into my head when I read the post was making the whole thing into very large steps with stone retaining walls along the verticals, I remember studying some ancient culture a long time back that did this for farming their steep land and how great it worked. To get between them you could have switchbacks or stairs. But that would be a huge project.

[laohaire]

That sounds nice! But my budget is $20

I mean, seriously, I was just going to get some of those concrete circles at WalMart or something. Or maybe even build a few landings from 4 x 88cent bricks, something like that.

Just not sure how to handle the dirt above it, since nature abhorrs a vacuum and weeds will fill it.

[mindymom]

i think if you dig out divets with vertical dirt above them they are eventually going to erode away and bury your stepping stones, kwim?
i would dig no deeper than the height of the stone,using the dirt i removed to build a little mound underneath the downhill side, like:

\
\__
| _|
\

if that makes sense.

[MacKinnon]

Well, the $20 budget makes it hard, LOL! Our only mostly-sunny spot (still only gets about 7 hours of sun) is on a steep incline (OK, steep for Michigan, and it's a little hill). We are building in 3 foot by 10 foot raised beds, two of them tiered in steps, three across, for a total of 6 X 30 feet of gardening space. We are using untreated 2 X 8 X 10's to make raised bed boxes built into the hill side. Talk to me after Sunday about how it goes! But we've budgeted about $100 for lumber, and about $100 for top soil to fill the raised beds.

[mindymom]

Originally Posted by mindymom

i think if you dig out divets with vertical dirt above them they are eventually going to erode away and bury your stepping stones, kwim?
i would dig no deeper than the height of the stone,using the dirt i removed to build a little mound underneath the downhill side, like:

\
\__
| _|
\

if that makes sense.

sorry, my little picture did not turn out!

[Rhiannon Feimorgan]

Terracing would be a great solution if you had the budget. Seeing as you don't, could you use something like flexible plastic lawn edging to make a small retaining wall around the uphill side of your stepping stone? You could bend it to the shape of the stone and then plant some sort of ground cover above it to hide it. Bricks would be prettier but the plastic edging would be way cheaper.

[MacKinnon]

I'm not sure if this link will work, but we've started our terraced beds. We don't need to order top soil because the back fill from digging out the trenches for the boards, etc. is filling them.