5 acres, to be exact…that’s a LOT of things. And WEEDS. OMG the WEEDS!!! Not to mention the blackberry bushes that we’re just ignoring. /whine.
A Blank Canvas
And so it begins
I figured the best approach to tackling this much land was to start at the house and work our way out. So we started right at the front porch and, with all scrap wood from the house build, “we” built this wrap-around planter box (for the roses I had bought weeks before).
I did help with lots of digging though. See all of the rocks piled up? Those were just from digging up the planter box area. So many rocks. But then that gave me an idea for a walkway along the planter box. Yes!
We got all of my roses planted and then picked out a few gardenias for the shady side.
We added some weed barrier and bark later. The roses even bloomed! (Before the deer ate them all)…
Onto the Walkway
One issue that we will always have to contend with as long as we live here is the slope of the land. And with the slope comes the water…and drainage issues. Thankfully when the contractors laid the front walkway, we reminded them that we needed pipes running below so that we can run electrical or whatever else we needed to without digging up the walkway. So we used one of those pipes to tie into this new drainage pipe running along the walkway. The plan is to add rocks (we might have a few laying around) on top of the pipe to hide it.
We added sand to the crushed rock to help level the bricks and just started laying those down in a simple pattern. We also added a drain that tied into the pipe just in case there’s any water build up. Here’s an in progress pic:
The last step is to fill in the gaps with sand…we just used a broom to brush it in. Voila!
And now that we’ve lived with this for a bit, we’ve realized that we need to redo at least half of it to level it all out better. There’s never a lack of things to do around here! The rains are about to start again so we might have to switch back to working on the guest space.
