Spring Landscaping Project 2: Mulched Paths

Right, so let's continue, shall we? After shuffling the trees around and pouring an expanded concrete stone edge to the big patio coming off the back of the house, the next step was to fill in a mulched path area. As you will see below, there's a bit of ground between the patio and the border I planted around the fenced-in rose/herb garden (below that chain-link fence I covered with plastic lattice is around the rose/herb garden. This bit of ground is shady most of the day and gets a lot of traffic, so grass did not grow well there. It was a no-brainer to just make that area a mulched walk-way, but then I decided to expand the mulched area between the flower border/beds and new tree/patio/seat area--less tricky to mow that way. I rototilled a lot of the area just so it would be relatively level, and transplanted some good sod to where we had moved the plum tree from (cutting sod is the WORST!). Then to keep grass and weeds (and dreaded trumpet creeper) from growing through the mulch, I lay out strips of landscape tarp:

Actually, before that I had expanded that garden bed at the back of the picture forward more, which will ease some of the crowding that was happening and to make the wall come out as far here as it would need to over to the left where the wildflowers are growing. If you look at the border bed curving toward you on the right, you will see that I had concrete edgers already delineating that so I just set one layer of narrow rocks on top of that. The more woodland-y section in the background had not had any formal edging beyond some pieces of tree-limb from a tree we had cut down last year, so here, and all along the rest of the edge of the yard, I'm doing a combination of a narrow plastic edging strip, and the rock wall in front of it. The edging is a pain in the butt, 'cause you have to hoe and/or pick-axe a narrow, even trench to sink at least half of it, and there are always roots that have to be dealt with. Then you fill in around it and help delineate curves and/or hold it upright with stakes every few feet. But that should keep the flowers in the flower garden and the grass out. It also helps provide a little back-brace for the two or three layer fieldstone wall in front of it. So with all edging in place, landscape tarp layed, ground stapled and tucked under the re-assembled rock wall, I was ready to add mulch. Lots of mulch. THIS much mulch:That is four cubic yards of hardwood mulch from a local landscaping supply place, that my brother-in-law kindly drove Himself and I to pick up using his trailer, covered in plastic to keep us from mulching the highway on the way home, and somehow crammed into our side-yard, where it will remain for the foreseeable future, until I have shoveled out enough cart-loads to empty it, or at least reduce it to a small, manageable pile. I don't think there will be any problem of having too much...for you see--it is a key ingredient for my landscaping plans, as you see below in this finished section:


That's the view from the door that goes out into our driveway from the new addition (there's a sliding glass door around the corner to the left that exits onto the patio. You can see the extra hard-scaping I added using concrete molds last month on the left, and a little strip at the bottom of the picture (that is a well-trod path going between the patio and the rose/herb garden, and around to the driveway). That area on the left expands the patio space for potted plants.

Having an embarassment of fieldstones now, I decided to fill in just between those two areas where I'm likely to be standing and watering a lot in summer with stepping stones (instead of home-made concrete ones. That kinda sucked 'cause I had already laid the landscape tarp, once side of which was now under that patio, so I ended out cutting out an area for each stone and hollowing a bit of earth out so the stone would lie secure and level when walked on. Laying a stepping stones or pavers is a huge pain in the arse, let me tell you! But in the end, there it is, all mulched in and looking neat. So you see, you can trip down the pathway to the left and go out into the middle of the yard, or you can pause on the lovely bench and contemplate the house, potted plants on the patio, and the little bed there that I re-worked and re-walled (contains Indian hawthorne shrub, a couple amarylli, spring daffs still have their foliage up, a couple hosta, "Mocha" heuchera):


or you can gambol down the longer path to your right which ends in the lawn and wildflower bed:


Both branches of the path end in yet more large fieldstones set in the ground at kinda stepping-stone height so one can step easily onto the lawn as well as drag lawn-mowers and wheelbarrows to and from the back and front-yards with minimal obstruction. But since the landscape tarp goes under them, they anchor the tarp, prevent mulch from going out into the grass, and the grass should not grow between, just tidied up in front with the weed-whacker. Sooo many things to consider in landscaping! I'm very happy with it so far, but still have a lot to do.

When these pics were taken I had dug in the plastic edging strip and replaced the initial temporary rock-wall all the way across the wildflowers (still mostly primroses and poppies but starting to also get coreopsis) and stopped at a stone path to a bird-feeder before the next major area to landscape--the sunny street-side corner. The added complication of having the rock-wall next to grass, as opposed to mulch, is that I'm putting a recycled rubber faux-mulch mat under the rocks, so grass will not grow between them and up to the plastic edger. You can get this stuff at Lowe's, HD or Wal-mart; it's brown, about 5 inches wide and a half-inch thick--they also make circular mats to go around the base of new trees out of this stuff.

So that's it for now. I started rototilling and working in soil amendments on Friday but was interrupted by, oh, a tornado and hail-storm, put in the edger and started planting and trans-planting things in the corner on Saturday and Sunday between more rain showers (muddy mess) and hope to have the planting finished tomorrow (Tuesday), then on to landscape-tarping and mulching. Maybe pics by the weekend?

Oh, if you want to see more pics of the landscaping project with more description, plus pics of the hail-storm, click on the Flickr Slideshow on the bottom right--both have their own sets in the photostream.