promethean_spark's "1/2 the normal plant spacing" works for me as well for most things. A couple of points to keep in mind: (1) the concrete will absorb and retain heat longer so while some plant roots will benefit from that extra heat in the early spring, it can be a plant killer in mid-summer. Plan accordingly. (2) If you plant tall things like tomatoes and peppers or corn near the outside edge it makes it quite difficult to reach the middle of the bed for care and harvesting. Plan to keep the tallest items in the center of the bed. Dave

wow .... i was afraid you had a 5 foot alley and JUST HAD TO USE THAT SPACE .... what a primo yard ... and what a spectacular wall ... why in the world you are fixating on that 6 inches of soil is beyond me ... be the wall .. love the wall ... kill the grass ... repaint the fence... and then move that lounger [the word is escaping me.. lol] .... and turn it with the wall to the back of your head .... and enjoy the rest of the yard ... fool around with your little planting space.. and somewhere down the line.. you will find something that works ... good luck ken PS: a lot of the plants around the yard/fence.. are planted way too close to the fence .... they should be out 3 to 5 feet .... so you have the ability to work on the fence.. and so the plants are free of it.. and also so the plants dont negatively impact the wooden fence in 5.. 10 .. 15 years ...

My opinion? If you plan on staying in your house for a long time, and you don't want to have to do the project all over again in a few years, I'd throw out cheap and do it right the first time, even if you have to do it in stages. So, I'd spend the money on whatever kind of stone appeals to you. Your idea with one level would probably be cheapest and the least amount of labor. This is a minor thing, but if you have grass up next to the stone, it tends to grow up into the crevices between the stones, and trying to weed whack the edge is a pain. My husband complains about it every other week. So keep that in mind as well, especially if you intend to have grass on all levels. I'd also not do a concrete footing unless you KNOW you would never want to change it, and I wouldn't mortar the stone unless you do the concrete footing. I've seen some nice retaining walls in my neighborhood with what they call at HD the Estate Edge stacked stone. It looks best if your walls are each at least 3 stones high, and that would probably mean just one wall in your case.

Rainfall is highly variable. We often get significantly more or less rain than our mesonet station, and the difference can be that they record 3" and we have 12" or they record 3" and we get 0.01". I use the official rainfall for amusement purposes only because, in general, it bears little relationship to how much actual rainfall we record at our house. We have three rain gauges, each of them about 100' apart, and even over that small of an area, we often see differences of 1/4-1/2" recorded during one rainfall event. I figured that out pretty quickly after we moved here, but it took me a lot longer to realize that even our temperatures can vary a very great deal from the official recordings. There have been times we have been 10-12" hotter than the high temp recorded at our mesonet station, or 3-6" colder, and we have our thermometers posted the proper way at 5' above ground level in full shade. It is shocking when you start tracking your own rainfall and temperatures and comparing them to the nearest mesonet station and discover how different they can be. I think this partially explains why my last average freeze date is March 29th, but for 8 of the last 11 years, we have had our actual last freeze at our house during the first week in May. I cannot wait until May to plant my veggies and flowers or the heat will burn them up before they grow much and do anything, so I plant when I am supposed to, based on average last frost date data and on how warm my soil is, and then cover up the plants with floating row cover on the occasional night we have late freezing temperatures. I'm in a low-lying creek hollow area within the already low-lying Red River Valley so I've just had to learn to adjust my planting timing to the weather we actually have here on our property as opposed to the weather they record several miles away at our county's OK Mesonet station. This year's rainfall is highly unusual and unlikely to be repeated more than once or twice a decade. Most of the people who live around me plant trees and shrubs on the western and southern exposures of their homes which provides a lot of shade for shorter plants in flower/shrub beds as well as providing shade for patios, porches and the homes themselves. We all do that because there's not many plants that will survive a typical June-August with highs in the upper 90s through 110 or so routinely, and often very little rainfall if it rains at all. That's doubly true when those same plants have to survive the one or two years per decade when we have heavy flooding rains that last for 2 or 3 months and cause many plants in clay soil to die from root rot. And, if you have dense, slow-draining clay, the list of what will tolerate both extreme heat/drought as well as occasional years where rainfall is so high it is off the charts....well, the list drops down to almost nothing. I can grow liriope now in the dappled shade to the west and south of our home, but in the early years it scorched and turned brown every summer. So did dwarf mondo grass. I used a lot of short yaupon hollies and nandinas, and even the nandinas scorched in July and August until the trees got tall enough to shade them more. I finally just went with annual bedding plants for ages, and then had to fight the battle to keep the bermuda grass out of them. Once you've got the dappled shade from the shrubs and trees, you can grow liriope and other plants that cannot tolerate full sun in the summer on a western or southern exposure, but it can take a decade to get enough shade to then be able to plant what you want. We are rural so most people here are probably less picky about their landscaping than in town in a subdivision where the houses are close to one another. We also plant a lot of taller plants, like cannas, right alongside the home's foundation to shade the walls of the house from the western and southern sun and heat. One of my favorite plants in the early years here when we had little shade and far too much sunlight and drought was 'Stokes' yaupon holly, but it gets taller than a foot high. I even resorted to putting bird netting down on top of my mulch to hold it in place. I staked it down close to the ground with U-shaped landscape staples. It held the mulch in place pretty well during heavy rainfall, but wild animals and our free-range chickens made a mess of it. Also, snakes would try to crawl through it and get hung up in the netting. So, I switched strategies and choose mulch that wouldn't wash away. Instead of using bark mulch, I use grass clippings and shredded/chopped autumn leaves. We have about 10 acres of woodland so once it is cold and the snakes are down for the season, I go into the woodland and rake/collect all the leaves I can. They pack down with rainfall and stick to one another and don't wash away easily most year. As they break down, they enrich the soil. To be honest, though, in a year with rain like we had in the spring and early summer, this is not much mulch (except stone) that won't wash away. Sometimes pine needle mulch (if you can find it) will hold its own against heavy rainfall, and if you can find the finely shredded cypress mulch, it will too. But, in a year when we have had too many days with 6", 8", 10" or 12" rain events, mulch is going to be carried off by rainfall/runoff. There's just no way around that and there's no simple solution. The nursery in Denison cannot give you a good list of what will tolerate a southern or western exposure here because there's not many plants that can handle our perpetual heat and drought in the height you want and in the clay soil you have. Hence.....all the folks around here with rock mulch around a few widely space shrubs. If you had sandy soil, you'd have more options, but you don't. I like creeping plants like Asian jasmine and winter creeper (there's both a green version and a purple version). Wandering jew and purple wandering jew also have done well in my dense soil on the south side of the house. My west side is mostly shaded now, but in the early years I had mostly lantana there, which functions more like an annual than a perennial because it cannot tolerate the heavy, slow-draining, dense red clay soil in wet winters. So, I'm not sure I can tell you what WILL grow in a western exposure with heavy, dense, slow-draining clay but I have a very, very long list of plants I have tried that failed in a similar situation since 1999. We have to be realistic and deal with the actual weather we have and, in any given year, we have no idea if we are going to spend April, May and June flooded (usually not, but maybe 2 or 3 times a decade) or if we will spend June, July and August with practically no rainfall and with severe, extreme or exceptional drought, which seems to be the rule any more rather than the exception to the rule. This year, joy of joys, we have had both! At our house, we had 71" of rainfall from mid-June of 2014 through early July of 2015. Sounds great, doesn't it? Now, after less than 2" of rain in the last 90 days, we are in Extreme Drought and are having grass fires practically every day. Does it seem logical to go from flooding in early summer to moderate, severe or extreme drought just 30-60 days later? Of course not, but that it what it is like to live here, and plants that tolerate both extremes are rare. Watch the fields around you or the homes that have been there longer than yours and you may find some landscaping ideas. That's how I found purple wintercreeper. Someone who lives several miles from us has it growing in their bar ditch where it gets flooded in spring and roasts in the hot summer months, and yet it always looks good. I figured if it could live in a bar ditch without irrigation in the summer, it could tolerate my dense clay soil in summer with some irrigation, and it has. The same weedy native sedge that drove me crazy in the early years by trying to grow where I wanted to plant something else is now my liriope substitute. The Virginia Creeper vines that climb my fence and get into my veggie garden where they are not welcome? They are great at holding the soil on the north side of the house where there's a steep dropoff from our yard down to the adjacent woodland that sits 6 or 8' lower than our house. The trumpet creeper that is highly invasive? Our tornado shelter is buried beneath a huge green mound of it with only the door visible. You learn to work with the plants that want to grow here, not the ones you'd like to plant and grow instead. This year we had widow's tears pop up all over the place. It isn't my favorite plant, but it loves dense clay in wet years (not so much in dry years) so instead of digging it out of my beds, I just enjoyed it while it was there, knowing that when drought returned, it would dry up and go away (it did). For so long (we've been here since 1999), I fought my soil and the weather and tried to grow what I wanted to grow. It was a long time before I wised up and learned to look at my natural landscape (we're on acreage) and to learn from what grows here naturally. Once I understood both our weather patterns (crazy as they are, they is a certain consistency within a decade) and our soil (horrible red clay, but better every year as mulch decays and enriches it), I was better able to figure out what plants tolerate both. Most people here often just have bermuda grass on the southern and western exposures of their homes because it can handle anything, but I hate bermuda grass because of the way it invades flower beds, so that doesn't really work for me. For anything that I am serious about growing, I have raised beds that sit 4-8" above grade level and that are filled with very highly amended clay. WIth soil like that, I can grow anything (including liriope) as long as I am willing to irrigate it. I think you might get away with liriope on the west side of your house if you have highly amended soil rich in organic matter, if you irrigate, and if you have planted some trees that eventually will give it dappled shade, but you'll have to put up with a lot of scorching for the first 3-5 years. The plants that I planted our first 2 or 3 or 4 years here? They're almost all gone now, replaced by tougher, hardier plants that never would have been my first choice. You have to work with what you have in terms of heat, rainfall, sunlight, etc. and the plants that grew well for me in a kinder (though still hot and dry) climate in Fort Worth are not the ones that grow well for me here. I also think that nurseries assume most people are "plant it and forget about it" types who want something easy they can plop into the ground and mostly forget about. For a serious gardener who will amend soil and irrigate consistently, then I think some plants can be used that they wouldn't recommend to a non-gardener who wants a maintenance-free landscape. So, if I were you, I might try a limited planting of liriope and see for myself how it does. That's what I did, and it might have worked were it not for the drought of 2003 (less than 19" of rain that year) and the drought of 2005-2006 (maybe 25" of rain in 2005 and I don't even remember what we had in 2006). After 2005-06, I pulled out the liriope and used some of the ground cover type junipers but they get 1-2' tall even if you get the shortest ones available. This winter I'm taking them out. Having learned that wildfire is a big threat in my region in winter, I don't want any junipers near the house, which is too bad because they grow really well in our clay. At one point we had six, and now I'm going to be taking out the last one. It looks awful, and I am not sure if the flooding got it or the subsequent drought, but it is half-dead and it is time for it to go. I'll probably replace it with daylilies, hopefully the evergreen to semi-evergreen ones. That area has shade from a chaste tree, so maybe the daylillies won't even bloom there, but if all they do is hold the soil in place so it doesn't erode, I'll be happy. The western expsoure of our home is hard to landscape, but easier now that we have trees that provide some shade. In the beginning, nothing would grow there and everything just roasted in the afternoon sun and heat. So, my main landscape solution has been just to plant tons of trees and shrubs so that someday I'd have enough shade to grow more ornamental plants in heavy shade to dappled shade.