Weekend Warriors
Saturday
Lest you think that Kirk did all the work on this, allow me to share what we did with Glenn on Saturday, June 17.
That shovel and rake in the foreground were in my hands a lot more than they were on the ground, and I have some nice, tough calluses to prove it. Job number one (after bringing the kids home from piano lessons) was to shovel dirt up against all the sides of the raised beds and tamp it down to hold the wooden sides in place for the stone dust. Kirk and Glenn wheelbarrowed nearly endless amounts of stone dust into the path areas, and I raked it smooth and filled in all the gaps. This happened in three of the four quadrants (the ones with the maze-y paths).
For reference, these are the areas we were working on. The yellow indicates the part with the stone dust; the brown sort-of-concentric "Cs" are planting areas. The planting beds are 4 feet wide; the stone paths between are 3 feet wide, except for the larger square in the middle.
After the stone dust base was down, we loaded in 1/2 inch gravel stone in those maze paths. Again, Kirk and Glenn (and later Glenn's kids) wheelbarrowed it in, and I raked it into place. This was much, much heavier: 6.875 TONS of gravel, to be exact. So I'm building a garden and some muscle here. The end result of this day's work:
This (finally!) looks like something. That was a shit-ton of gravel to move around, but it looks the way we thought it would, and it sounds really great when it crunches underfoot.
Sunday
On Sunday we shifted our focus back to the patio quadrant of the garden. Glenn showed Kirk how to use 1-inch PVC pipe to measure the height of the stone dust and scrape it perfectly level, which makes a good, flat base to lay bricks on. So Sunday was all about laying those bricks. Since the area is a 19-foot square, it's basically like a room within the garden – a dining room, to be specific, since this is where we'll put the table and chairs to eat outside. With that in mind, we thought we'd give the bricks a border and then a central field to mimic an oriental rug that might be in an indoor dining room.
Unfortunately, it's hard to get a photo of the pattern because the bricks are all still quite dusty. Later we will scrub them off and seal them and preserve the color (which should look darker once they're clean). Hopefully they'll photograph better then. In the meantime, you can imagine a border of bricks lined up the wide way on the outside, then a row lined up the skinny way inside of that, then wide, then skinny, and then an interior field of herringbone (at right angles, not on the diagonal, which would have involved waaaaaaaay too much cutting).
Okay, so a picture would be better. Working on it.
Update
So I sprayed down the bricks in the patio quadrant so you can see better what I was trying to describe above.
This is a detail of the one of the corners of the patio. You can see the border around the top and right. To the lower left is the herringbone field that actually stretches quite far across most of the area. The whitish patches are just where the bricks were already drying in the sun.
Lest you think that Kirk did all the work on this, allow me to share what we did with Glenn on Saturday, June 17.
For reference, these are the areas we were working on. The yellow indicates the part with the stone dust; the brown sort-of-concentric "Cs" are planting areas. The planting beds are 4 feet wide; the stone paths between are 3 feet wide, except for the larger square in the middle.
After the stone dust base was down, we loaded in 1/2 inch gravel stone in those maze paths. Again, Kirk and Glenn (and later Glenn's kids) wheelbarrowed it in, and I raked it into place. This was much, much heavier: 6.875 TONS of gravel, to be exact. So I'm building a garden and some muscle here. The end result of this day's work:
This (finally!) looks like something. That was a shit-ton of gravel to move around, but it looks the way we thought it would, and it sounds really great when it crunches underfoot.
Sunday
On Sunday we shifted our focus back to the patio quadrant of the garden. Glenn showed Kirk how to use 1-inch PVC pipe to measure the height of the stone dust and scrape it perfectly level, which makes a good, flat base to lay bricks on. So Sunday was all about laying those bricks. Since the area is a 19-foot square, it's basically like a room within the garden – a dining room, to be specific, since this is where we'll put the table and chairs to eat outside. With that in mind, we thought we'd give the bricks a border and then a central field to mimic an oriental rug that might be in an indoor dining room.
Unfortunately, it's hard to get a photo of the pattern because the bricks are all still quite dusty. Later we will scrub them off and seal them and preserve the color (which should look darker once they're clean). Hopefully they'll photograph better then. In the meantime, you can imagine a border of bricks lined up the wide way on the outside, then a row lined up the skinny way inside of that, then wide, then skinny, and then an interior field of herringbone (at right angles, not on the diagonal, which would have involved waaaaaaaay too much cutting).
Okay, so a picture would be better. Working on it.
Update
So I sprayed down the bricks in the patio quadrant so you can see better what I was trying to describe above.
This is a detail of the one of the corners of the patio. You can see the border around the top and right. To the lower left is the herringbone field that actually stretches quite far across most of the area. The whitish patches are just where the bricks were already drying in the sun.
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