4.15.10

Today was a lot of "lather, rinse, repeat". I had a lot of the east-to-west paths to take care of. They had to be weeded, loosened, combed through, and then have the soil dug out and removed. I was working between the raindrops, for sure. With the forecast not in my favor for the next two weeks, my biggest concern is getting the soil dug out. The more rain the soil takes on, the heavier it becomes. I'm trying to shave off the top 3-4" while it's still dry-ish. When the rain was coming down too hard to dig, I booked it to Home Depot for more bark mulch.

I started marking out the rough location of the compost bin. That's what those stakes in the ground are. And, I started consolidating the mulch pile.

Before...

Got through steps one and two for this path, but left three for a later day.

I knew this path was going to take a little more work than the others, since I was going to pull out those pavers and the pea gravel. I also had to weed the edges of the path to prep it for the bark mulch. I liked this look, but it wasn't friendly for my knees, or my wallet!

Pavers popped out.

Pea gravel dug out. I kept it to use in a French drain for another part of the yard. I left the DG and the weedcloth though.

Cardboard. You've seen this all before.

Aaaaand, MULCH! Done!

This path is the one on the "blackberry side" of the garden, closest to the sidewalk. I kept having to move things from here to there. Move pavers from aisle X to aisle Y, bags of sand from aisle Y to aisle W, etc, etc. It was becoming redundant, not to mention tiresome. I finally got smart and moved things into grouped piles in front of the garage. Joe the Frog moved with those things.

Cleaned out!

Weedcloth and cardboard.

Mulch.

This is the path on the driveway side of the yard, closest to the sidewalk. See those bags of sand in there? That's the kind of thing I kept having to move from place to place. By early afternoon though, both my deliveries from Lowe's and the landscape stone place had arrived, so I grouped things accordingly.

Loosened and weeded.

Dug out. I ran out of weedcloth and mulch, so finishing this one will have to wait a bit.

I thought I was going to get to this path too, but the rain ate part of the day. So did plain ol' fatigue. Man, NONE of this is easy. And this path isn't as cut and dried as the rest. The part to the left of the picture, closest to the house, is going to become a succulent bed. It requires that I add a very short retaining wall, but that requires MUCH more precision than laying the paths. I also have to adjust the soil composition. Plus, I need to clean the area out. It houses all kinds of garden flotsam and jetsam - discarded, failed bean pole cages, an old hose, a busted soaker, random tools, and the four displaced blackberry plants. Yeah, not ready to mess with this one.








Randomly, I spotted this onion bud. Again with the fuzzy close-ups. But it's this beautiful little tear-drop shaped capsule absolutely bursting at the seams, filled with little white florets waiting to bloom. It looks so full of potential.

This is my first pile of excavated mud. With a showercap on. After a little calling around, I found out it would cost roughly an arm and a leg to have this stuff carted off. And it would just get shoved into a landfill. What sense does that make?! So I posted it as free fill dirt on Craigslist. Fingers crossed.

My pallets of toys! That's 3 pallets of stone to lay, and a pallet each of paver base and paver sand.