Design

The path to our front door is finally taking on the feel of a woodland path, happily.  In the second year after planting, the Christmas ferns, bloodroot, wild gingers, crested iris, and other (tough) woodland wildflowers are looking good. The rhododendrons are in flower now, so it feels a bit like being in the mountains.

An unusually balmy fall day (it hit 75° F in mid-afternoon) was great for gardening. The low humidity made for a deep blue sky, not the usual sort in the Southeastern U.S. My gardening companion (aka my husband) suddenly thought that we needed to place the stones 'left-over' from our front pathway project (uh, a couple of years ago) in the mulch beyond the backyard gate. He spread the gravel (the pile next to the garage has been there awhile, too), spread the stones, and said it was ready for the expert stone-placer (that's me). The front pathway has been a pleasing addition, but it WAS a huge effort, although quite rewarding . It was a bit challenging (these were the leftovers, after all). And, a couple of months of relative inactivity has left me in need of more strengthening work, and I'm certain to be sore tomorrow! But it was a good start to the path and patio that we've got planned, after a new delivery of stone. The gravel and stone are quite bright-l...

April has been perfect so far. No late freezes. No unpleasant hot spells. It's been rainy (hooray!) Today's weather was exceptional (and 'normal') - a high of about 70° F with a morning low in the upper 40's. The same is expected tomorrow. Coming home, the light was lovely, although still bright enough to fool the camera. I took another picture of our front path; it's really worked out well . And then I admired these lovely Tennis Ball lettuces. A butterhead variety grown by Thomas Jefferson, they're so pretty, they're hard to thin, much less harvest. A nice salad was part of my dinner out on the porch (my gardening companion is off taking photos of spring wildflowers in the Smokies).

A recent comment on a couple of old posts about laying a flagstone path reminded me of how well our path has held up. My most recent picture was in January (the one here), but I had just been thinking last week about how pleasant it is to have a nice stone path compared to its previous scruffy state. I haven't done any more stone work since then (aside from a small retaining wall next to the shed), and tidying up the wall bordering the main vegetable garden. Last summer's extreme drought made the short path and patio below the porch totally unappealing as a project. Maybe this summer!

It's really time to get rid of more grass. The drought is an incentive, not that we ever water our drought-tolerant Zoysia. But the frequently-trampled patches that used to be full of honeybee-friendly clover have become hard-packed clay punctuated by unattractive tufts of something unrecognizable. And as we're walking more around the house (post-garden shed) and taking Mocha (the pampered Golden retriever) out the kitchen door more (the main vegetable garden side), we're wearing down a path more than ever. I've been planning a flagstone patio on the porch side for awhile, mirroring the front walkway that I put in last fall, but I'm thinking I'll extend it around the house in an informal path, replacing the scruffy grass between the house and main vegetable garden with some sort of mulch or gravel/mulch mix beyond that. Flagstone there would be too much, competing with the house and the main vegetable garden's stacked stone edge. And the slope below the h...

I needed a third pallet of flagstone to finish the front path, and it was delivered late Saturday morning. In the meantime, my gardening companion dug up the rest of the base, taking a break from his regular mulch moving so I was ready (notice the HUGE piles dropped off 'free' by the powerline tree trimming contractors). There were a number of roots to work around and the path goes downhill slightly towards the drive, so it was a bit more challenging to do the final segment. But, I finished laying all the stone this afternoon, and cleaned up the area, although I still need to put in the rest of the granite paver base around the stone and make sure each stone is firmly set. It looks good, and Mocha was enjoying the view late this afternoon. It took roughly 2 1/2 pallets of flagstone and a couple of 'scoops' of paver base to do the pathway. My labor was about 2 days, spread out over 3 weekends. I worked in 2-3 hours stints, at most half a day, with plenty of 'light...

We've been wanting a decent path to the front door for a long time. We bought our house from the second owner; he seemed to use the side door into the master bedroom primarily. Odd, but effective. The path to the front door was grass, with a few half-buried concrete stepping stones evident, and the whole surface quite uneven because of roots and chipmunk tunnels. After we finally had lights installed in the garage, and the front porch lights repaired, it seemed like a good idea to finally put in a front path. It's been on my project list for awhile, along with a small wildlife pond. Last summer, with a bit more free time, I'd had a couple of landscapers come over to give me estimates. The first, working with a very reputable company, took a long time to provide an estimate, one that had my helpful gardening assistant (not Mocha, our Golden Retriever) gasping, and saying that he could easily dig the path base for me. The second estimate was a bald dollars per square foot ...