Garden Redo Project: Pathways

Once the fence was up, the beds built and filled with dirt, gates installed... it was finally time to do the pathways in the new garden.

The pathways are made up of slates, square stepping stone pavers, a brick-sized gray paver border and a whole lot of pea gravel.

First, the slates. My dad had these behind his shed and happily let us have them. They weigh a TON and are very sturdy. We took a bunch last fall and did the garage pathway with these, and now the rest are being used in the garden. We placed one on each side of the gates (inside and outside) and one in the back right corner (because we have 3 gates in 3 corners, so basically this balanced out the back side). There's also one in the middle of the garden and a couple of smaller slate pieces being used as stepping stones.

Second, the square pavers as stepping stones. These are inexpensive gray cement blocks from Home Depot, totally unremarkable but will definitely help stabilize the gravel along the pathways and make walking easier. I would have LOVED to splurge on tumbled gray pavers or even real stone stepping stones to mirror the slate, but it was totally out of budget. However, over time sitting in a pool of pea gravel with lots of treading, they will soon have the weathered paver look with time.

Around the outside of the garden, in front of the fence, are gray tumbled pavers that are the size of bricks but with a nicer patina. We got super lucky and found these early on sale for 25 cents each at Home Depot and bought what we needed. These are normally $.89-1.25 each depending on the store (less at HD, more at our local stone place). So it was an awesome deal when we needed over 200 (and normal bricks from HD are 50 cents at regular price).

These pavers serve multiple purposes. First, they provide a buffer between the grass and the fence to give the lawn mower enough room to mow without needing to use the edger. Secondly, they block the space under the fence from critters (yes they can easily climb and go through the slats, but if that becomes a problem I'm going to staple deer netting (not chicken wire anymore, that was a bad idea) inside the fence). And third they hold the pea gravel in place inside the garden and keep the weeds back from dropping seeds in the gravel.

We also had enough pavers to line the slate pathway along the garage. Well, almost the whole thing. I either need to buy a few more or steal them back from Matt's garden this fall.

So here's the 10,000+ lbs of pea gravel in our driveway:

I started at the pathway to the garden, adding more rock to level everything out better. This required lifting each slate up to get more rock underneath. I could have buried the outer paver border a little bit, but I didn't want it to be easily overtaken by the grass. And the pathways, after years of being walked on, was lower than the surrounding ground anyway. We just didn't have enough rock to raise it up back in the fall when we added the slates. This went surprisingly fast because we leveled everything out so well in the fall - adding a thing layer of rock and then putting the slate back down, they didn't rock at all after a quick leveling wiggle.

You can see the height difference here - a couple of inches - but it makes a huge difference!

All filled in... (the pots are where the rose bush will be planted once the paths are done and the arbor is built/installed):

In the garden we're doing this a section at a time. Pull up weeds/mow grass. Level out the ground the best we can. Lay down weed blocking fabric. Place square pavers and add pea gravel.

Morgan has a weird affinity for the weed blocking fabric, so we had to wait until the gates were installed so she couldn't lay on it, chew on it or dig at it - all ways she was ripping it early on. In fact she destroyed THREE ROLLS of it that I had just bought but shredding them when they were still rolled up.

This is going to take a while, but once we're done... it's going to be great. In the meantime, it's heavy and tiring in the summer heat and humidity, so I have to limit myself to a few loads at a time. I figured out that 4 loads in a row requires a break. And more than 8-10 loads in a day will result in severe back pain, so that's my limit. Each load is over 100 lbs, so our goal is to slowly chip away at it. 4 cubic yards of mulch now seems light as air compared to 5 cubic yards of rock.

My next garden redo post will be the finished garden. The finished paths, the assembled arbors and trellises.