Rock path

You may remember last fall I cut a path through my lawn (which at that time was pretty pathetic looking but seems to be shaping up pretty well now--the lawn, that is).

Here is what it looked like:



At that point the weather got cold and rainy so I couldn't finish the path. The next step was to get a load of sand and put down about 2 inches.

This past weekend my husband and I went to his shop and fixed the trailer so we could go to get a load of sand. The trailer holds exactly one cubic yard of sand or gravel--if you only have about 2 miles to travel. On a back road. Any further than that and I'm not sure we would have made it.



I put down all the sand and smoothed it with a piece of 2x4. The cats love it.

Remember my rock wall? The one that really isn't a wall, but an edge? Well, my rock path isn't really a rock path, I just call it that. I have a mold that will make fake rocks so I can make a fake rock path out of concrete. Pretty tricky.



Next I mixed the concrete. One bucket of Portland cement, 2.5 buckets of sand, 1.5 buckets of gravel, and 1/2 bucket of water.




Mix with a hoe until you think your arms will fall off and then mix some more. This is where my husband would have come in handy but he was off finding me a trowel.

Now I positioned the form where I wanted the rocks. It actually makes the rocks separate so they can be moved around a bit, but it is best to put them where you want them to begin with. I will be doing some moving and positioning later since I want to put other things in the path with the rocks.

Then I started plopping the concrete into the form. This is pretty hard because it has to be jiggled into all the corners without pushing the form down into the sand.





It helps to slap the trowel on the surface of the concrete to jiggle the rocks down and bring the water to the surface. This makes the top smoother and easier to scrape level. When I was done getting everything smooth (with help from my husband) we removed the form and moved on to the next section.



The batch of concrete made enough for 2 sections plus part of another. I will need some extra rocks for filling in edges and so on, so we will use the extras there. Hopefully I will get better and quicker as I go on, because I was so slow. Of course the little guy was playing in the yard so I kept getting distracted. Babies are so time consuming. Always falling over or getting into things.



It got to dark to do any more so I had to quit, but here is what it looked like this morning.



The next step is to get another load of sand--I used up the first load for the foundation--and finish the stones. I am adding other things as I go. Bricks, a glass block or two, and large grinding stone that is broken in half. Hopefully my very creative husband will be able to pitch in and help his not very creative wife. Then we will fill in the cracks with dirt or sand and plant a few ground cover plants in the bigger spaces.

I hope to be done before the year 2010.

In case anyone is wondering, my husband did work on the garage this weekend. Between running to the horse barn to watch his niece and nephew compete in a horse show and running errands for me. We hope to be done with the garage sometime before the year 2010, too.