John,

Once the dirt is wet, I suppose you just need some sun and wind to dry it
out.

To protect an area of the yard from rain, I have a suggestion based on some
experience: I have been working on a large garden bed outside our sunroom
for about two months, off and on. It has rained a lot during this time.
When the forecast was for rain during some crucial time--like in the middle
of trenching and leveling a course of brick edgers--I used several large
tarps to cover the work-in-progress and divert water to a nearby catch
basin. This method worked fairly well. You just have to be able to divert
the water to a different area of the yard, or in my case, to underground
drainage.

Regards,

Joe Morris

Please remove ZAP to email me.

"John Gehlsen" wrote in message
om...
I recently started a project in my backyard. I had a small hill that
I wanted to level out to provide more usable space so that I could
build a patio.

I had a contractor come in and build a rock wall that got rid of the
hill and created a lower level and upper level in my backyard. He did
a great job and I am ready to move onto the second phase of my project
- replacing the sprinklers that were removed when the rock wall was
put in.

The problem is that I live in the Pacific Northwest and the weather
during this time of year is extremely unpredictable. The weather was
perfect when the rock wall was being built and was supposed to be nice
this past weekend (the weatherman predicted light rain). Needless to
say, the weatherman was wrong and it poured over the weekend (1.5
inches) leaving me with a mess in my backyard.

The forecast for the coming week doesn't look very good as it is
supposed to rain almost every day this week.

I am hoping that someone in this newsgroup who has more landscaping
experience than I have can share some of their tricks for drying out
and protecting dirt areas. I think that it is going to take a couple
of weeks of dry weather to dry out my backyard so that I can work on
it.

Any tips to help make this process go faster?

Thanks.

John
Seattle, WA