When I did my back-yard landscape two years ago, I knew it was way more than I wanted to tackle at my age and so I hired a commercial landscape outfit to do he work. The landscape was to be approximately 10 ft deep and 150 ft wide. In central and northeast Mississippi, we have what's called Yazoo clay, and this clay sits approximately 2" below my "topsoil" and grass, and is literally 10 ft deep! When it is wet, a shovel-full weighs in at 25 lbs and when it is dry, it is like concrete. So you see the reason why I hired this job out. The landscape company brought in two huge backhoes, a huge tiller, and a trencher to do the job. Of the 12 workers, 5 had shovels in hand, four had pitch-forks, and 3 had wheelbarrows. The project took five days and I don't think they made a cent of profit on the work! They had to dig out clay four feet down and it filled two dump-trucks. They brought in two dump-trucks full of "garden soil" and then a dump-truck full of cypress mulch. I think they put in around 50 plants. So far, due to all their hard work and ammending every square inch of planted soil, everything is still growing well. Ken
