Long, long overdue progress has been made. Till this point, the landscaping has been non-existant. Whatever grass was torn up by the skidsteer around the pool was just dirt. It's been like this since the pool went up June of last year...
So today I didn't have to go anywhere, and I said I was going to work on it a little. I already had a small pile of rocks for this, and a few months back picked up a bunch of edger blocks and landscape fabric. All I needed was to do some work. So that's what I did. Here it is some time after starting, with rocks and edger blocks in place.
And about five and a half hours after the first picture, this is where I ended. I've filled rocks in four sections between uprights. There are 25 sections around the pool, so I am roughly 1/6 of the way done. I then sloped the dirt and planted a grass/clover seed mix, and did that for approximately half the distance I did the rocks...
There are edger blocks placed till where the rocks stop, they are just covered by the landscape fabric. I have this rolled up until I bring the dirt up next to the edgers, after which I trim it more or less flush with the top of the dirt.
So my process was as follows. First, I snapped off the foam approximately equal to the distance the boards the feet rest on stick out. At this point I then filled in the gaps between the foam and the boards with whatever fill material I had laying around. For some I used this sand/gravel mix I dug up with a post hole digger (this stuff is under most of my yard under ~2' of soil). For some of the others the fine gray rock mix you can see in this picture which forms the base of the pool stuck out past the edgers, and I dug it up and used that to fill the gaps on some of the other legs.
After that I put landscape fabric down, placed edgers ~24" from the edge of the pool liner, and poured in the rocks.
I then marked out a line approximately 4.5' from the edge of the edgers. Plan was this is where I would begin sloping the dirt down to the pool on the side where we dug into a slight hill. With the help of a small tiller I loosened up the dirt higher than this slope, and redistributed it. I added some dirt from one of the several piles of dirt I have leftover from digging holes for the fence. This was run to approximately half the height of the edger blocks, to help keep the grass from growing over the tops of the edgers. I leveled it off with a landscaping rake, planted a mix of grass and clover seeds, the covered with straw and watered. And put up a temporary fence to keep our dog from running through the area until the new ground cover can establish.
I've got three disconnected timelapse videos I could merge into one (battery died, I charged, started another, didn't realize it was set to end after an hour, started a third, battery died again...). I'll see about posting those up here in the nearish future.
