When we got our House on Porter St three and a half years ago, I could not have been more excited to dream about what to do with this beautiful blank canvas. I love that the house has a shed and garage that match the exterior of the house. I started in the back left corner and began tearing out grass and conditioning the soil. It proved difficult and time-consuming as the ground was hard to cultivate since it had some enormous root systems from old trees. It has been slow work. I also had to work around leftover concrete that was meant to allow a car to access the back garage. That impacted where I could add brick or the perimeter of a garden bed. I chose this area because it had full sun and was far enough from the house that I didn’t have to think about it affecting a potential wrap-around porch and screened-in porch that I have been dreaming of.
Fisher really wanted a veggie garden but we waited until our second spring to begin that endeavor. Our dear friend Buck built this raised garden bed for us and it really added a lot of shape to the area. I hired out two local excavators to help with the job!
It wasn’t until the great lockdown of 2020 that I decided to keep tearing out grass and slowly tarping the bare areas with Landscaping plastic. It helped me burn off some of the crazy to have a job that I worked on bit by bit through the uncertain times of the pandemic. I put chairs and a fire pit right on that tarp and pretended like there was a patio already there.
I asked for 8 tons of pea gravel for my birthday, mother’s day, and any other holiday I could think of. And then one fine day it arrived!
I didn’t realize that it was 90 degrees the day that pile was delivered until my neighbor mentioned it. I was so happy I jumped right into shoveling gravel into a wheelbarrow and took what would be the first of many trips to transfer it onto the tarp. I used metal edging to create a firm edge that would help hold the gravel in place. I later added oversized cobblestones to cover the metal edging and give it a more permanent look. I borrowed a tamp from the Lincolns so long Abe said, “keep tamping they will never find the bodies”. Later, I added some oversized pavers to give some stability to the path to the garage and in the area that had the most pea gravel. I ended up tucking some foam-like pavers under some of the gravel in order to level 2 of the chairs. The patio is far from level but the pea gravel is affordable and forgiving. It was a great material for me to use. I keep finding parts of the rubber pavers uncovered but realized that it’s my children that are digging it out! It was a labor of love and one I am delighted to enjoy every day! SM
