Views of our property

I'm beginning by gathering information about the property.  Since I spent my career as a programmer for a mapping agency, I naturally have maps on the mind.I have collected these items over the last year from various public sources.

First I located the survey done in 2000 (Fig. 1) when I bought the house.  I scanned and rotated it to orient it northward.

Fig. 1. 2000 survey of the property.

St. Louis County has some pretty cool documentation on properties in the county. I located the one for our property (Fig. 2). Our property line is marked in blue.  The image must have been taken in winter and is several years old, as the garden does not show and the old chain link fence is in place.  Also, the river birches, red buds and locusts I planted must have been pretty small.

Fig. 2. From county tax information.

Figure 3 shows a view from Google Maps. I'm not sure exactly how I got it, as I haven't been able to duplicate it. It could be that they have changed their software. At any rate, I had saved it as a PDF. I extracted the image using The GIMP. The date of the image is a bit later and must be in summer. The chain link fence is still there and you can see the river birches I planted behind the house and the red bud and golden locusts I planted between our house and the house to the right in the image. You can also see the remnants of the small straw bale garden in that big empty triangular space to the right. That is where our garden is now. It would be interesting to see more current imagery.

Fig. 3. From Google Maps

Figure 4 is taken from the USGS 7.5 minute quad chart available from their site in geo PDF format.  Our property is approximately the small red square.  You can see how it fits into the larger area, being located on a ridge line.

Fig. 4. From USGS quad chart.

Figure 5 is from the same file as Figure 4. I discovered that you can turn on and off various layers in the geo PDF, but that saving a view as a file is not possible, at least with Adobe Acrobat.  So I did a screen shot.  At the very top left corner is the Missouri River. You can see the flood plain where some unfortunate development is happening.  Our property is indicated by a small red arrow.

Fig 5. Also from USGS quad chart,

New swales and a carbon dump

The last few weeks we have been reconfiguring our garden along contour lines, with swales.  We are making wider beds and filling the swales/paths with straw.  I need to order white duch clover seed to seed the remaining "lawn" along with creeping thyme and Roman chamomile.  We'll let the violets grow, too.  We also want to do beds along the fence line to plant with a diverse array of pollinator attractors.  I'm also going to put in some dye plants, like dyer's coreopsis, which is also a native.
We also built a carbon dump for cardboard, junk mail, etc.  Annie laid a couple of pallets against the fence with the slats horizontal and Dodger pulled another escape. Annie thinks he is part goat.