Corral Gone - Tiered Garden Areas

For those who have been to the house or who have seen earlier posts where I showed the area off the deck that the previous owners used for a dog corral, the area is ugly.  I have tried twice now to grow grass in the area... totally digging up the area, raking it down, putting down lime, starter fertilizer, watering religiously.  Nothing grew!  My thinking is that they never let the poor dog out of the area and rarely, if ever, cleaned it up.  They obviously were big on throwing straw down there for the poor animal.  Regardless, the soil was totally doggie ruined.  I had been tossing around ideas for over a year about what to do there discarding ideas almost as fast as we thought of them.  A week or so ago I decided on building some kind of tiered planter areas which would provide the depth to add a LOT of new soil. So, that's what I've been working on the last couple of days.  A few shots as reminder of how the area looked and how it has ended up thus far:

Notice the nice, big hydrangea off the back corner of the house.  You'll see it again below.

It's a rather steep slope that you can obviously see by following the brick line.

This is the ugly view we've had looking down off the deck.  Lovely... just lovely.

Well under way with the bottom layer of stones down.  Anyone who has done this knows how long this takes!  I wanted to cover the black, unbricked area of the foundation so you can see I had to build it up pretty high and I'd need a lot of dirt.

Some hours later -- a lot of hours later -- the two walls were built.  I totally broke up the dirt, kind of leveled it, and called it a day.

Looking down at the end of the first day.  If I did nothing more than this it would have been a whole lot better :)

Day 2 was another very full day but this is the end of the day.  72 bags of dirt later, the area was at the height I wanted it and I took to moving the hydrangea.  Oh how nothing is easy down here!  The bush was growing very well and is very big but the problem was all the BIG rocks around the roots of the plant.  I've learned to flood any area I'm going to dig in and then shovel the goop as best as I can.  After much struggling and goop shoveling the sucker was out and transplanted in it's new home.  Now I'll work on doing something with the remaining dirt area and I will bury the drainage run properly.  Pretty good though!

And this is the new 'morning view' of the area.  The plant was a bit upset about being dug up and was shocked a bit but with a good watering last night it's looking as healthy as it did before.  It's a big sucker!  I'll think about what we're going to put in the lower section in the days to come and take it from there.  Of course I'll post the pictures when that is done as well.