Skip the chips. Stick with grass. Grass is actually very low maintenance so long as your standards are low. I ran a dog boarding kennel for a few years and wood chips are a very bad idea. Our exercise yards were gravel and grass and bare dirt. Wood chips can harbor fleas, and some dogs will eat the chips, and others will refuse to walk on them. Would you, with bare feet? I wouldn't so why would they. Splinters and sharp pieces. Using cedar chips will not repel the fleas as the small pieces will volatilize all the repellant compounds rather quickly. My ideal, with my two medium sized active dogs, when I get my own place, will be to have a graveled dog run they can be confined in while I'm at work. No more tearing up the yard digging after moles and creating muddy race tracks where they tear around corners. Dogs like gravel pretty well, it doesn't harbor fleas, and it's easy to pick up off of. Concrete is low maintenance but most dogs don't like it all that much for lying around on. Then they can enjoy the 'lawn' when I'm home. Like yours, mine is lumpy and weedy. The lumpiness comes from having a lot of fescue and bluegrass in the grass, which form tufts, and the racing dog traffic wears away fine soil particles in between the tufts, leaving low spots in between tufts of grass. More irrigation in summer, and annual top dressing with organic material would help, but it's a rental. Bentgrass works pretty well with dogs as it's a running grass and knits itself together. Where there's a lot of bentgrass the lawn stays together except where they've dug after moles. If your dog is very small then choice of grass doesn't matter so much, but for medium sized and larger dogs, go with bentgrass if you can get it. I have to use a 5ft wire mesh fence with heavy T posts to keep my dogs out of the veggies and rhodie border. Not pretty but the 60 lber will haul herself over anything shorter. A stiffer fence could be shorter I guess, wood or chain link, or even better supported wire mesh, which means wood posts set in concrete. Don't use the cheap fencing stuff, unless your dog is tiny.

Hi Popi, my family and I have been brewing for a while and we've found Tony Ackland's site Home distillation of alcohol informative on all aspects af home brew, wine making etc. If you have a brew shop close by you can buy wine making kits, the staff are always keen to talk to and teach people the finer points. Let your son know that the longer you leave it the better it is. Happy brewing, Ree Here is a link that might be useful: http://homedistiller.org/

Nice job on the drought make over. @ Greenclaws across the pond: We were in a decade long drought and are probably headed back into it. During our really horrid part of it when we actually had only 5" of rain during a 12 month period in an area that claims to have an annual rain fall of 34". I subsist on Rain water collection for 100% of my needs. I walked away from my garden and the only thing that showed life were the things in pots. The ground becomes so dry and porous, that the water is just sucked down and out of the root zone. The water in the soil that creates a lens that additional water to collect on is just plain gone. If it is clay, it goes down huge cracks into the subsoil and all you do is piss off the scorpions in the cracks. I could pore water out of a hose and a puddle did not form. I watched grass turn to grey ash, everything dried up and flew away in the wind. Pots actually hold the water by the pot zone for awhile. I watered them once a week in the 75 days of 100F+ weather. My succulents and cactus were my only live things. Some Chinese leaks and mexican oregano seemed to be hold outs of the plants in the ground but they were d@mn sad. The live oaks never put on a full flush of leaves and what leaves were there were held in a vertical manner so even the shade was on vacation.. The in ground agaves collapsed and turned dormant. I saw prickly pear wither that were in the ground. If one reads about garden in arid zones, one finds that pots are how one grows water loving plants. I know, it is counter intuitive. It was amazing to see things green up after the the drought broke. The thing about everyone going to the gravel garden and reducing their watering of lawns means that the trees in the neighborhood that are not on gardeners drip lines will suffer, and the urban canopy gets damaged. The constant watering of whole neighborhoods have spoiled the trees. can't win. LOL. I read a article on this a while back.

This problem would be best explored in plan view. Prepare a base plan showing the existing hardscape features, property limits and tree trunk locations. How you run the fence would depend on those things in addition to the shape, size and location of the pool. Your thread title indicates that grade is major constraint, but it does not show in the photos you've provided. You'll need to find a way to make it obvious in the pictures.