Terracing - hardscaping

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WayehMalamutes Spring City, TN(Zone 7b) Jul 30, 2006

I have a red clay bank thanks to the bulldozers that leveled my backyard for dog kennels. The bank is 125' wide and 30' tall and above the newly flat yard. Direct sun from noon to dark over most of it, some 1/4 will have part shade after 3pm.

So I am building terraces, pick and shovel and landscape timber and rebar. The bank is pretty steep, too steep to mow, too steep to walk safely. But I'm starting at the bottom, shoveling out a flat "step" about 4' from front to back, and then stacking landscape timbers front and back, with rebar drilled through them and into the clay ground. Then I break up the bottom of the new bed with the mattock and fill the new "bed" in with good soil. This will be the widest bed by far.

Then I go uphill of the first bed and build a narrow level path the same way, but don't break up the bottom, and fill in a shallow "bed" of crushed rock and then mulch to help stabilize and prevent washing -- working out pretty good so long as I put a wall on the uphill side first. Then go uphill and start the next bed, but more narrow and more shallow than the first one -- just because that's what was left to work with on this steep slope.

This is one of those projects that may end up on my gravestone -- She would have turned 40 this year, decided not to take it lying down, and boy was she wrong.

My QUESTIONS are:

1) Anyone tackled a project like this and lived to tell about it?
2) Any advice for the crazy woman with the gleem in her eye and the mattock in her hand?
3) Once I get this built, I will want to plant things that spread like mad, look good from a 10-60' distance and require little or no maintence because I'm not sure I'll ever want to look at this durned thing again once its done.

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