AlanLichty
Moderator
A couple of summers ago I "inherited" my wife's garden in our backyard after squirrels destroyed her watering system and health concerns forced her to step away from working on it. It took a couple of months but I managed to resurrect the watering system and we removed all of the bird feeders that had attracted the squirrels in the first place. The yard was by then thoroughly invaded by oxalis, ground cover strawberries and Persian violets. The ceanothus in the foreground was in its death throes and had to be removed.
I decided the stone walkway was a serious fall hazard that was hard to navigate needed to be replaced so I hatched a simple scheme to rip them out and add some paver stones this last spring. My plan if you can call it that was a quickie set of concrete pavers. The first step was to clear out the ground cover plants around the stones.
This shot makes it clear how much of a trip hazard the stones were.
I decided that a curving path would invite too many weeds so I went for a straight path across the back.
Everything I read about pavers said I needed a gravel bed with sand on top before laying down the pavers so I grabbed my trusty pick and shovel to start excavating. I used some old cedar boards as guides while digging.
After I dug out the path trench for the gravel and sand I did some dry fitting of the pavers to confirm I had a clear path.
The gravel bed for the pathway ended up needing 2 1/2 yards from my local landscape store's bulk materials section so 5 trips in my half ton Tacoma followed by another 1/2 yard of masonry sand.
Two pallets of paving stones later (320 pavers) I made it across the back yard and started trying to figure out how to connect the path to an existing sidewalk. My drone helped a lot with layout work throughout this project.
I ended up sawing some of the pavers to make 45º angles to connect the old sidewalk to the new walkway.
I ended up with nearly 3 yards of spoil dirt from the excavations so decided to level out more of the yard and turned my blueberry bed into a raised bed. I took all of the old stones from the original walkway and stacked them into a low retaining wall so I could level out the space behind the original flower beds. Last but not least I used 4x4 pressure treated wood as edging along the perimeter of the walkway.
The raised blueberry bed with fir bark dust layered on all of the spoil dirt from the trench.
For what started as a simple plan it ended up being more of a terraforming project than just dropping down some paving stones. I ended up moving roughly 5 1/2 tons of material in the process of this buildout and left garden beds fallow for the summer during the project. I started it in late May and only finished last week. Lots of new ways to rethink what we plant and where next year
I decided the stone walkway was a serious fall hazard that was hard to navigate needed to be replaced so I hatched a simple scheme to rip them out and add some paver stones this last spring. My plan if you can call it that was a quickie set of concrete pavers. The first step was to clear out the ground cover plants around the stones.
This shot makes it clear how much of a trip hazard the stones were.
I decided that a curving path would invite too many weeds so I went for a straight path across the back.
Everything I read about pavers said I needed a gravel bed with sand on top before laying down the pavers so I grabbed my trusty pick and shovel to start excavating. I used some old cedar boards as guides while digging.
After I dug out the path trench for the gravel and sand I did some dry fitting of the pavers to confirm I had a clear path.
The gravel bed for the pathway ended up needing 2 1/2 yards from my local landscape store's bulk materials section so 5 trips in my half ton Tacoma followed by another 1/2 yard of masonry sand.
Two pallets of paving stones later (320 pavers) I made it across the back yard and started trying to figure out how to connect the path to an existing sidewalk. My drone helped a lot with layout work throughout this project.
I ended up sawing some of the pavers to make 45º angles to connect the old sidewalk to the new walkway.
I ended up with nearly 3 yards of spoil dirt from the excavations so decided to level out more of the yard and turned my blueberry bed into a raised bed. I took all of the old stones from the original walkway and stacked them into a low retaining wall so I could level out the space behind the original flower beds. Last but not least I used 4x4 pressure treated wood as edging along the perimeter of the walkway.
The raised blueberry bed with fir bark dust layered on all of the spoil dirt from the trench.
For what started as a simple plan it ended up being more of a terraforming project than just dropping down some paving stones. I ended up moving roughly 5 1/2 tons of material in the process of this buildout and left garden beds fallow for the summer during the project. I started it in late May and only finished last week. Lots of new ways to rethink what we plant and where next year
