“What’s a berm?” “Why are you building that?” “What’s the reason again?” These are some of the questions I get when I tell people we’re taking dirt from the back yard and walking it in a wheelbarrow to the front yard to build a berm.
Here’s our house “Before”
AND AFTER!
This is the area behind our house I grabbed dirt, branches and rocks from to fill the berm
I’d say it took a good 80-100 loads of dirt (About 4-5 hours) to get it up to 18 inches. We threw old sand from the sandbox, rocks, dirt, grass – anything we could find to bulk up the berm for free.
After it was an acceptable size I layed down newspaper and old cardboard boxes instead of landscape fabric. This is the part the neighbors were probably the most confused about but hey it’s free and works just as well!
We got 3 yards of mulch delivered to top it off, bought a rhododendron bush, a wild grass bush and some pretty colorful annuals. Each year we’ll plant more until it fills in. For now this is all we wanted to spend but it adds interest to the yard and blocks out some of the traffic noise. It’s a win win!
Here she is right after I finished building it up…
Here’s the berm all filled in 2 years later! I got rocks from a local friend that is redesigning her back yard and wanted everything cleared out. It took several trips but I lined the berm with rocks and continued to plant annuals from seed every summer. Love it all filled in!
Here are the rocks I got from a friend
