your doing a lot of digging but im not so sure you know what you want yet for a finished project. your digging a straight line like the patio . thats almost impossible to make look natural. There are few straight lines in nature. like @YShahar photo having a round out away from the patio in one are allows for a nice bush planting or boulder.
Yep, that digging was done with my original plan of a rectangular pond and l-shaped bog in mind. My current digging is the chat and road base path under/up against the fence at the bottom of the picture.
Your stacking dirt over on the side but is that an area your building up. ? or are you going to need to move that dirt again?
That's an attempt to save the good topsoil with mulch and compost in it so that we can reuse it for a berm and building up the areas that don't become water features. Once we get past the good stuff we hit clay that I'll take to the dump.
Those lines appear to be for multiple homes that cut through your yard. They should be down at least 18 inches but thats not the problem the problem is your not suppose to build on that area. i mentioned this before. your markings look like there are three lines running through your yard. here in the east you are restricted what you can do above and around them.
There are 4. Two Comcast lines pretty much directly under our south fence and the two CenturyLink lines going through the middle of the yard.
The utility finder didn't tell me if they're main line or to houses. I do know that the west neighbors have a green CenturyLink post just the other side of our shared fence and the Comcast hub/green post that goes to houses is in the Southwest corner of our yard.
In addition to being installed down a foot or two from the original ground level, I raised the ground level in my backyard during the pandemic in an effort to make the yard level enough to drag the trampoline around on, so the lines *may* be deep enough to not be a problem. I say *may* because the gas line in the front yard was supposed to be 3-5 feet down but I accidentally cut it with my shovel about a foot and a half to two feet down when trying to dig out a stump shortly after buying my house. So I don't really trust the depths that things are supposed to be.
As far as not being allowed to build there, the rule out here seems to be that if the utilities can still dig to their lines you're fine. All of my neighbors landscape anywhere in their yards without concern for the lines. We just need to know where they are and dig by hand within 2 feet either side of the markings if we have to dig there at all.
That's one of the reasons I'm doing a chat path against the fence where Comcast's lines run. They can dig through the chat, road base, and weed block cloth, do what they need to, and then put things back.
I'm working on ways to avoid hard scaping over the CenturyLink lines through the middle of the yard. That's another reason (besides the original plan not looking natural) for the redesign. If I keep it mostly grass, perennials, shrubs, or whatever, they should still be able to access their lines if needed. CenturyLink link has never needed to come in the 10 years I've been here so I don't think they'll need to anytime soon but you're right that better safe than sorry. For the few feet where the stream will cross the markings I'll probably build up the dirt even more before installing the waterfall and stream and if they need to dig under that, they can. The one time Comcast came they dug very carefully and narrowly so it wasn't a huge problem.
I do hear you on not having straight lines or right angles. The new plan will have a lot more curves. I like the style of what YShahar did with her pictures and may try to do something along those lines.
