Category: DIY

This weekend, not surprisingly, we continued working on the new path in the front yard.  We had two main goals: (1) to loosen up the soil and mix in the soil amendment and (2) to line the path with cobble stones to define its edges.

We already had a big pile of soil amendment sitting in the driveway, which we had delivered with the birds eye gravel a few days ago.  We didn’t have the cobble stones delivered at the same time, though, and here’s why.  First, I calculated that we needed 1/2 a cubic yard of cobble stones to line the edge of the path, but the landscape supplier will not deliver less than 1 cubic yard of any given material.  Second, the delivery trucks only have two bays, so they can only deliver two different materials at a time.  Since we were already having gravel and soil amendment delivered, it would have been an additional delivery (at $50 a pop) and we would have had to buy twice as much as we needed.  No thanks.

The gentleman I spoke with at the landscape supply place suggested that we come in and bag some cobble stones ourselves.  That way, we would not incur extra delivery costs or have a ton left over.  Plus we would be able to avoid broken stones, and actually pick out the nice looking stones.  So we did.

I wish I had brought my camera, but maybe a description of the place would suffice.  Essentially, there are many bays created by cinder block walls, each one filled with a different material, gravel, rocks, barks, sand, dirt, you name it, they have it.  We backed my car right into the bay filled with large cobblestones, put our bags in the back seat, and started filling them up, stone by stone.  We were warned to put the bags in the car and then fill them, because there is no lifting those things once they are full.  I would also suggest bringing gloves.  I don’t know what we were thinking not bringing any, since we use work gloves for practically everything.  They certainly would have come in handy.  Also, sensible shoes.  Climbing all over a giant pile of cobble stones in flip flops was probably not the smartest thing I’ve ever done, and I’m lucky I didn’t smash any toes.

After a few other errands, we did finally get to work on the yard, but we only got about half way through what I thought we could accomplish this weekend.  We mixed the soil amendment into the lower part of the yard and lines one side of the path.  I think it looks pretty good; we just need to finish the other half and get some plantings in there.  I don’t see anything happening until next weekend though, and I can imagine our neighbors complaining any minute now about the pile of soil amendment still in our driveway.

 

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I really didn’t think we’d have much to add right away on the path progress, but it looks like things are moving right along!

I had two cubic yards of bird’s eye gravel delivered yesterday morning.

It was hard to watch the delivery guy dump a huge pile of gravel on the driveway because, as you may recall, we already have another huge pile of rocks that used to be in the front yard that we are trying to get rid of, slowly but surely.

Anyway, I thought I might surprise Steve by having the whole path filled in when he got home from work.  I got started first by laying the weed block down on the path area.  This was a little bit tougher than I thought.  Because the path is all curvy, I had to cut the weed block into many pieces to make it fit, rather than just rolling it out as I would have been able to do if the path was just a straight line.  This meant I needed a lot more cramp-ons (giant staples you hammer into the ground to hold down the cloth).  It also took a lot more weed block than I originally calculated because you have to overlap by several inches at each joint, and I had not considered that the curve would require so many joints.  So, that meant a trip to Home Depot.  And, because I’m conscientious about time and gas, I packed in a few more errands while I was out, which meant I didn’t really even get to working on this until after 6PM.

Okay, back to the actual path construction.  I ended up with two rolls of weed block, 3 feet wide by 50 feet long, and 40 cramp-ons altogether.  Since the path is 4 feet wide, I cut the weed block in pieces 52 inches long, so there would be a couple of extra inches on each side of the path.  Then I just started laying them down, overlapping by at least 2 inches, and often more to accommodate the curve.  This is what it looked like when I was done:

Then came the “easy” part.  I just started loading up the wheelbarrow with gravel and dumping it over the weed block.  When I say “easy,” I mean easy once you get the hang of it.  Also, “easy” in the sense that’s it’s not rocket science, as opposed to it not being tiring and tedious work.

I learned a couple of things.  One is not to overfill the wheelbarrow.  Just because there is physically more room in the wheelbarrow does not mean you will be able to control it.  In fact, you will likely end up tipping it over accidentally and dumping gravel exactly where you don’t want it.  Two is to dump the gravel in from the lower side of the slope, rather than the upper.  It’s a little easier to empty from the upper side, but again, harder to control, and if you lose control you’ll end up crushing the bender board edging, requiring emergency repairs.  Steve helped with both of these situations when he got home.

Last night I think I got maybe a third of the way done.

I started back at it this morning and finished shortly after 1pm.

Of course, it’s not quite finished.  I did tamp it down some to settle the gravel a bit, but we’ll probably need to do that a bit more, and perhaps wet it while doing so.  Then we’ll fill in any sparse area with leftover gravel.  We’re also going to line the edges with cobble stones to give it a rustic look.  And of course, all the dirt around it needs leveling, and the addition of some soil amendment (you might have noticed a big pile of dirt on the driveway in some of the pictures), and of course, plants.  But reasonable progress, I think.

© 2011 The Beehive All Rights Reserved

Last summer, we shared a lot of work we did on a part of our front yard.  It took us weeks — maybe it was actually months — to clear our yard of ugly white landscaping rock, overgrown rosemary, and weeds.  By the time we were done, we were too tired to actually replace anything we removed with something new.  We took a little vacation from yard work, did some upkeep on other areas that we had been neglecting, and before we knew it, the bad weather was upon us.  So the space sat idle for months with nothing more than occasional weeding.

 

Now that it has stopped raining and the weather is actually behaving somewhat like we expect it to in June, we are back outside.  Part of our plan is to create a winding little gravel path.  We thought it would be visually interesting, provide access to the interior areas of the space, and provide a bit of a low maintenance area (no watering and easy weeding with no actual plantings).  We did the excavation of the path area recently.

We (read: I) did some research as to how to DIY a gravel path.  We (I) decided to follow the instructions in an old edition of the Sunset Western Landscaping book.  In a nutshell, it suggested excavating down about 3 inches, installing some sort of edging, adding a 1-inch layer of sand, tamping it down, then adding a 2-inch layer of your desired gravel. Pretty easy, right?

Day 1 of our project involved excavating the upper side of the path and installing our edging.  We chose 4″ redwood bender board (which is actually only 3.5″, not 4″ — where did the lumber industry learn how to measure?).  We had already marked off the area where we wanted the path to go with some landscaping stakes and string.  Actually, it was so long ago, the string was long gone.  So we just connected the dots of the stakes with a gentle curve and held the bender board in place with more of the same landscaping stakes.

The bender boards were originally 8′ long, but we found we had to cut some of them shorter because we could not get the curve we wanted and stay level with the slope without twisting the board.  We also overlapped the boards by a couple of inches at each joint to prevent dirt from seeping or gravel seeping out through the seams.

So this is what we had at the end of Day1:

We were pretty pleased.  It didn’t look bad and it didn’t really take all that long.  We were confident we’d have no problem finishing the excavation on Day 2.  Well, the second day ended up being a little bit harder than we expected.  It involved a lot more measuring because we wanted to make sure the width of the path was consistent.  Plus, in addition to just digging the sides and installing the bender board, we needed to dig out the whole middle of the path and make sure it was nice and even and level (we used a 10″ square hand tamper to help with that).

It took us pretty much all day, but we reached our goal of getting the structure of the whole path in place.  All we need to do now is order the fill materials and dump them in.

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