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yard, part 3:
putting down gravel
reason #2,347 that we really need an alley
We've had the backyard
dug
out for a few years now, and the retaining walls
built for almost as long,
but still haven't been able to enjoy our backyard. Our
attic project is the main culprit, which consumed almost all of our home improvement time
for a little over a year, as well as our home improvement budget during
that time; we hardly had time to keep the weeds down, and not even that so
well as we should've, let alone time to spare for anything else in the
yard.
So despite having a nice
clear area in the back for a patio, with a table and some chairs where we
could sit and read, it's been nothing but a dirt pit with a nice stone
wall for awhile. Or a mud pit, when it rains. Well, we finally got fed up
and decided to do something about it. We still wouldn't have time to
really work on the yard until the spring, but at the very least, we could
put down a nice surface so the dirt and mud was no longer an issue.
When we'd originally dug
out the yard, we'd envisioned flagstone for the walking surface, with moss
packed between the stones to allow drainage and give the look we wanted.
We needed a walking surface not just for our patio area, but also for the
easement strip along the north side of the house, the small landing area
just of the front porch, and around the two raised planting beds we were
planning to put in. Altogether, it's a huge area, and that much flagstone
just wasn't in our budget. Heck, there wasn't enough in our budget for
flagstone for just for the patio area.
So that meant Plan B.
Bricks and pavers were out -- almost as expensive as any of the flagstone
types -- and
we didn't want to put down concrete. We briefly considered regional
alternatives, like ground oyster shells and crunched up hazelnut shells,
but decided against them -- the former because we couldn't get the
quantities we needed, the latter because of their similarity to walking on pea
gravel. And we knew we didn't want pea gravel, since it can be as hard to
walk on as walking on dry sand. Which is when the obvious question
occurred to me: what do plant nurseries use for their gravel paths? A
quick call to Portland Nursery yielded both an answer and a solution:
chipped granite gravel. It's economical, readily available (at least
here), and packs down really tightly, so it's easy to walk on and you can
even wheel your rolling garbage can or wheelbarrow across it without
making ruts. Perfect!
To get a good, thick layer
down, we calculated that we needed 16 tons of gravel, which meant ordering
it directly from our vendor's wholesale supplier, who would have to bring
it in a dump truck instead of bagged (it would've cost significantly more
to have it bagged first, and we would've had to wait several weeks because
our order was so large). Normally, this wouldn't be a problem for pretty
much everyone else. Except us, of course, because of those damn stairs
that are, at times, the bane of our existence.
Yes, we'd hauled over 7
tons of retaining wall stones up those stairs (and when I say "we", I mean
"Sal"), but this would have to come up in buckets, and there was more than
twice as much as there had been of those stones. There was no way the two
of us were going to be able to get all the gravel hauled up the stairs in
a single day. (The gravel would have to be dumped on the street and the
city requires it to be off the street within 24 hours.)
Which is where, yet again,
our good and generous friends came to our rescue. (Different batch than
the ones who came out to save us on the drywalling project -- you have to
spread out these special requests amongst your friends or you soon run out
friends.) It's a testament to both their goodness and generosity that when
we uttered the words "16 tons of gravel", none of them changed their minds
about saying "yes". It's an even bigger testament that when they first
drove up and actually saw that 16 tons up close and personal, that they
didn't just keep driving.
So late on a Friday
afternoon, a dump truck from Scappoose Sand & Gravel dumped a big pile of
chipped granite gravel in front of our house and early Saturday morning,
the two of us and five very good and generous friends attacked that pile
with shovels, five gallon buckets, and a wheelbarrow. And don't think the
chorus of that Ernie Ford song wasn't playing in my head All. Damn. Day.
Instead of weed barrier,
we've been using several thicknesses of old newspapers all over the yard.
To that point, we'd been using it to kill off our grass, in preparation
for barkdusting and planting eventually; the newspaper works beautifully,
it's biodegradable, and since Sal does the recycling for the bakery,
freely and abundantly available. So we used it as the weed barrier for the
gravel, laying it down thick, then wetting it down to hold it in place,
then dumping the gravel on top.
We put gravel down in our
patio area in the back, in the easement along the north side, and at the
landing in the front. What was left had to go around the planting beds,
which weren't built yet, so we formed a bucket brigade and piled it up in
the yard in the meantime (and since we were trying to kill of our grass to
replace it with native groundcover, a big pile of gravel in the yard
wasn't an issue). By
three o'clock, every last bit of that daunting pile was up off the street
and placed somewhere in our yard. That, dear readers, is friendship.
So once again, those
stairs presented a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, and once again, we
bested them. With a little help from our friends, and not without a
few injuries -- very few things will make you ache all over like filling a
five gallon bucket full of rocks, lifting it up as you twist 180 degrees,
and handing it up over your head -- but we now have a backyard that, while
not yet landscaped or "prettified", is no longer a big mud pit.
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