Rockin' & Rollin'

One last project we wanted to complete in our new backyard oasis (besides staining the deck when the times comes) was laying down some gravel. I had mentioned previously that we were going to do a gravel border around the deck. I wanted to do that to create a buffer zone that would make mowing much easier.

I also wanted to gravel around our fire pit which had previously been a lonely little pit all by itself in the yard. With the addition of the deck, it was much closer to the action, but I wanted to really tie it in and make it feel like part of the same space.

I started out by laying my landscape fabric in the rough shape that I wanted. Since the fabric is rectangular, and the shape I was going for was round, it was a pretty rough layout. After I got things looking generally the way I wanted, I took my edging and used the included stakes to lay it out over top the fabric. The I went around the outside of the edging and cut off the excess. I did a bit of adjusting and finagling after that until I was happy with the way it looked.

Then we were ready for gravel! We went to a couple of landscape places around town, as well as Lowes to check out their bagged gravel. I learned that gravel is quite a bit more expensive than I had anticipated.

I fell in love with the first kind we saw which was a black granite chip. It was pretty on par with most everything else that we saw, cost-wise. So we ordered 2 tons of it and had it delivered to the house.

This is what 4,000 pounds of gravel looks like. A little underwhelming right? I was afraid it wasn't going to be enough, but as we got to spreading it, it turned out we had plenty.

David shoveled it into a wheelbarrow and dumped it out on the landscape fabric while I used a garden rake to spread it around. It took only about an hour before we were done.

I'm very pleased with it. And yes, we do need to mow the grass pretty badly.

And the border helps to hide any unevenness of our skirt boards, which is an added bonus.

I can't wait to make some s'mores out here.

With the extra we had, we filled in around our paver walkway. Despite a few seasons of attempted moss growing, the results were pretty lackluster. We didn't want to kill what was still there, so we just filled in gravel around it.

And with that, out backyard oasis is complete! It's been such a huge change in just about one month. We spend so much more time out here than we did last summer, and I am thrilled with how its all turned out.