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.
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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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