The Ditch Project Becomes the Path Project

Hello and welcome to Part 2 of the project we started last weekend and continued this past weekend. On Thursday the Mountain Man took the truck to town to pick up the last 1000 pounds of gravel (total gravel purchase for the driveway and ditch - 30 tons or {I'll do the math for you} 60,000 pounds. So when you think about it in those terms, $700 seems pretty cheap.) and we finished the gravel that night. Here's a picture of the Queen shoveling gravel out of the truck and having a grand time.

Saturday The Mountain Man began construction on the flower bed and the "walls" of the path itself. I took the kids to a party at the park for lunch with a number of people, which allowed him to work undisturbed, since he had to crawl under the porch and get the latticework and baseboards put up in preparation for the flowerbed.

Once we got home, we were able to "help." The kids both LOVED pounding nails. The Queen, being a perfectionist, insisted every nail go all the way in. DeBoy was satisfied with a few taps and ready to move on to the next one. Getting nails into treated lumber is VERY hard, so the Mountain Man hit (smirk) upon the idea of letting them drive nails into some styrofoam insulation material leftover from the unfinished Great Porch Ceiling project that was part of the Great Building DeBoy a Room project of 2005.


Ready for mulching and fill dirt.













The Yard Machine (that's the actual name of it) aka "The Beast." The Mountain Man dragged this out of the shed in preparation for reducing our mountain of sticks that threatens to fall over onto the truck stick pile into mulch for the path. Only to be confronted with the reality of no gasoline. So since we needed fill dirt for the flower bed anyway, I went to town and picked up gasoline, went to Lowe's for 8 40-pound bags of soil which I loaded by myself, thank you very much, and 6 plants. I also went to the big store for dog food because they were completely out and looking longingly at the cats.

Once I got back, mulching began in earnest. Strider is testing out the first bag. For some reason he loves to sleep on mulch. Eight bags later, we had enough for the path. In the meantime, I set about dumping the dirt into the flower bed. If you ever do this, it may be good to put the dirt in the flower bed before you start putting mulch on the path. Just in case you accidentally tip the wheelbarrow over and dump a bunch of topsoil on your freshly mulched path. Not that I would know anything about that, of course.


Obviously, I have some spatial issues. I thought 3 mums would be enough. (The other 3 plants were hostas that went elsewhere in the garden.) This weekend we will be buying more plants, the last piece of lumber for the wall, and some decorative mulch.














This was my other project, an elf door. The door on the left is from Plow and Hearth. I made the one on the right out of polymer clay. I put my door on the tree next to my statue of St. Francis. . . . . What?