Advice on how to "affordably" landscape a steep slope.

The slope is not mowable, I have to weed eat it and it is precarious.

I can take a photo but I tend to try to avoid doxxing myself here…

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If you’re spending this much, just put in a retaining wall and have two levels of semi-level surfaces. $1200 of pine straw at $4/bail (last years price, now is $6/bail) is 300 bails of pine straw. Is that you spreading the pine straw or the guys driving thru the neighborhood telling you how many bails they laid down (they tend to tell you 1.5x plus number of bails actually used).

I would either let it go natural and weed eat or plant some creeping junipers or another plant that will spread. Maybe a clover or monkey grass or something as an alternative.

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That's not what we are spending, I haven't even budgeted for this. We had some emergency work done a while back to fix a sinkhole, and (converse to what you might think) removed a ton of dirt and trees.

Plus side, our yard got bigger. Downside, this sloped area has to be maintained. Prior to this, it was wooded. There's no point in terracing this with a wall, it has significant height, it is easily 20 feet tall at the highest point.

We let it go au naturale for a bit, with some wildflowers and whatnot, but it ended up looking like shiat, and I have to weed eat the whole thing down. It's steep enough that it's not an easy task. Volunteer pine trees come up like crazy if we don't have a thick cover.

We have used the same guy for pinestraw for years, there's no monkey business. Price installed is probably more like $6.75 now, but I haven't even called him up yet.

Thanks for the suggestions.

When we lived in Georgia, we had a large wooded sloped backyard. I would blow and rake up all of the leaves and put out about 90 bales of pine straw. It looked good but was expensive and I dreaded the work every February.

Then I planted about 1000 monkey grass small pint sized plants at about $3 each. At first I still raked the leaves and added the pine straw but I realized that the pine straw was stunting the monkey grass. Then I just let the leaves cover the ground and monkey grass completely and the monkey grass took off and would still grow through the leaves. My work went to almost zero afterwards. Where the monkey grass grew to tall I would cut it down with my lawn mower and not bag or remove anything. Eventually the monkey grass spread together and did not get too tall and made a great maintenance free ground cover. It took maybe 6 or so years to fill in, but it still performed well before then to hold in the leaves.

I'd plant it with native wildflowers. They will change with the season and never need to be mowed. Since you are not having to walk on it this is a perfect place to do this. Also it will be great for native bee's which we really need to look out for.

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I'd plant it with native wildflowers

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I agree with natives and just let it go.