Down the garden path

As alluded to in earlier posts, I've been undertaking some landscaping work in the garden for a fair while now. The excellent people who work with me have been suffering my talk of my weekends in the garden for a long time now, and in all honesty, they probably will for a while longer.

The main focus of my efforts so far as been a pathway from the front gate down the side of the house and round the back of the house. Those that follow the old Delayed Gratification blog about the extended purchase and building of the place may remember this post with pictures of the garden before we moved in. Here's a picture from that post from the side of the gate down the side of the house before I started on the pathway:

From when this was taken until the work on the pathway started we grew some pretty serious weeds down there, which in turn resulted in the compost pile/mousey nest recently removed from the courtyards.

After removing the weeds, I had some assistance from friends digging out the pathway to a depth of roughly 100mm and a width of around 700mm. Digging makes it sound much easier than it was. The reality is that a shovel barely penetrates more than a centimeter into the clay heavy soil, which had been compacted by the building process. We had to use a heavy mattock to work our way slowly along all 25m of the pathway in about four days of back-breaking labour.The rock content of the soil also makes it tough to dig in, often resulting in bone jarring ricochets and sparks where you hit a bit of flint. Here's the pile of rocks and left over concrete that came our while doing the path:

As hard as the excavation was, there was a tremendous sense of achievement when it was finished. The next step was to edge the pathway with plastic landscape edging. The edging is pretty heavy duty - 150mm high by about 7mm thick - but the plastic stakes from the same brand are bloody atrocious. They're long enough at about 300mm, but their construction just doesn't hold up to the conditions. For starters, they're reinforced down only one side, which means that while you may knock them in vertically, they list over as one side meets more resistance going through the soil than the other side. Secondly, they bend and absorb the force of the hammer knocking them into the ground, so that the force is dissipated rather than driving being translated through the stake and driving it into the ground.

Basically, they're just crap and they weren't up the the soil conditions. I ended up having to remove all the ones I managed to actually knock into the soil and replace them with the 300mm galvanised steel stakes I used for the rest of the edging. I did almost all of the edging on my own (with assistance from Briggs, initial B, for one stretch) until the last couple of stakes, when Dana decided she'd like to help out.

The first stake she knocked in went well. The second, less well - it into a water line in the garden, and before we knew it, we had a moat instead of a pathway. Imagine, if you will, the pair of us running around like headless chickens without a clue what to do. First we rang the water provider, where a bored telephone operator told us that if it was on our property, we should look for the stopcock (the stopcock, genius!) and call a plumber. 

Unfortunately, it was a public holiday and plumbers were in short supply. In addition, apparently the grey pipe that our water comes in is some sort of a rarity in plumbing circles, which no one was prepared to fix. Eventually the 20th person we rang said he knew someone who'd mentioned it at a site somewhere. He gave us a name and number, with instructions to say "Jim" sent us.

Above you can see the repaired pipe. It took the plumber we eventually reached all of 10 minutes to fix it in the end, although it took him a day to turn up. Nice guy though, and while the wait was frustrating, it meant we didn't have to pay the public holiday or weekend rates.You can see from the picture above that it's pretty lucky we hadn't hit the pipe already. You can also see that we had to dig a ruddy great hole in my pathway to fix it.

Here's the finished excavation and edging, with the hole filled in. I ended up having to shift the pathway over by about 100mm to avoid the line of the pipe. Knocking those last couple of stakes in was a little bit nervous.

I plan to get the sub base for the pathway delivered tomorrow so that the pathway is at least half way useful. It will involve lifting and shifting about two cubic meters of stuff, so I'm going to get my weekend exercise without doubt. 

For now, I'll leave you with this handrawn animation re-creation of Terminator 2, celebrating 20 years since its release. The music is a chiptune track by Rymdreglage (try pronouncing that five times quickly).