#Terrain Tuesday: Adventures In My Back Yard

Hello friends:

Not much to report here of late - this is my first blog post since I started a month’s vacation lasting all of August, which has been very pleasant thus far, with a fair number of miniatures on the painting bench and some out of town overnight trips with the lovely Joy (our first since Covid), and some significant outdoor landscaping projects under way, which I am going to call eligible for this week’s Terrain Tuesday feature.

To start the project, I needed a new wheelbarrow, which of course meant that I got a chance to put my scale modelling skills to use in a 1 to 1 scale project. We hone our model making skills for real-world moments such as this.  Everything was going swimmingly until I discovered that I had confused front and back in the somewhat minimal instructions, and so had to disassemble and reassemble the whole shebang.

One side of our house was landscaped with flagstones and pea gravel some twenty years ago.   It’s become quite overgrown and we would like to replace it all with a smooth interlocked brick or stone surface, which will look neater and be easier to keep clean.   We have some builders coming in the early fall to do that project, but for now there is some wasted space between two garden beds that I’d like to reclaim, joining the two garden beds and renewing the soil so I can plant hostas or some other shade-friendly plants together.    The area is about eight feet long by four feet wide, and I quickly discovered that the pea gravel is about two inches deep.   I wanted to be able to separate the gravel and the earth, so I knocked together this quick screening device to go over said wheelbarrow.

There is a LOT of pea gravel.  So much pea gravel. Here you can see the mix of gravel and flag stones that our contractors are going to take up.   It’s far too much work for me to do with a pick and shovel.

Underneath the pea gravel is, of course, a myriad of stones, brick fragments from the original construction that were apparently easier to bury than cart away, and of course, thick tangles of roots from the nearby maple trees.   But, I’m too far in to stop, and the garden bed is almost finished and ready for some compost, some bags of fresh clean black earth, and of course, plants.

The pea gravel is proving useful, as we have a garden bordered by large stones which had pretty much sunk into the ground.   Joy asked if I could dig out the stones and raise them slightly so they could be a more visible border.   So, several projects in one going on simultaneously.

 

Anyway, it’s all very satisfying and for now it makes up for not having gone to the gym since Covid.  

I hope you are enjoying some time off this August and thank you for taking the time to read this.   Blessings to your DIY projects.

Cheers,  MP+