It's a brick...path...it's mighty mighty

I've been spending obscene amounts of time in the backyard instead of diligently blogging about Terrence, which you are all beating down the door about. Patience, my sweets. Terrence shall come, at an hour ye know not.

Here is a list of what I've done since we got back from Thailand:
1. Tore out the thorn bushes
2. Dug some trenches to help with the drainage of the swampy areas
3. Chopped and piled the wood from a few dead trees that Burly Steve felled
4. Finished the brick path: 135 feet, 1620 bricks, 27 bags of sand, and 54 hours of work, going at a pace of 2.5 fph (feet per hour)
5. Planted 3 trees and 8 bushes, and put up an arbor
6. Created a bed for a vegetable garden for my lovely wife to plant at her convenience

The only way to make this remotely interesting is via pictures:

1. Thorn removal

Before (notice the bush and tree in the background)

AfterHuge pile o' thorns, which I burned that night

2. Dug some trenches

Before (you can see the big ugly mess, also notice the brick path is under water)

After (this is the south side of the path, this also counts as a vegetable garden picture)

North side of the path, leading towards Lake Hansen, the lowest point of the garden. Notice how much dirt has accumulated on the path from the erosion of the vegetable bed

3. Chopped and piled wood

Burly Steve took his manly chainsaw and felled some large trees, the biggest I estimated at 60 feet and counted 50 rings on its stump. You can see the old, dead tree here, it's in the back, middle right, without any leaves. Also we took down a snarly, windy dead tree, that is in the middle left of that same picture.

Burly Steve owns every single tool ever made. In the front of this pic is a log splitter, which is a durned cool machine. It is the Shaq of lawn and garden machines. It just dominates the paint. It will go through even the thickest of logs. Anyway, I used that for about 10 hours, and then spent another 5 hours piling the wood. It wasn't so exciting using the log splitter after a couple hours.

Bon fire, anyone?

4. Finished the brick path

It's hard to see it in this picture, but the path starts in the middle, going straight back for 20 feet, then to the right side until it reaches the "fence" (old broken horse pasture fence), then along the back edge and up the left side. It looks like a question mark without the dot. Just picture this: ?

Here is the first part, obviously. The veggie garden is on the left, the flower garden on the right. Both gardens are just dirt now, both of them have a trench down the middle. I also dug a trench to the left of the path so the path wouldn't have dirt accumulating from erosion.

Then it turns right...
...and along the broken fence which I will eventually repair. I intentionally put the path in between these 2 shrubs that arch over the path, although it's hard to see in this pic.
This is a pretty crappy pic, but it goes along the back edge here...

...and then back towards the firepit.

It was a pretty tough project. I got the bricks off of some Craig's List folks, looking to dispose of bricks, so I didn't have to pay anything. But I did make 5 or 6 trips loading my Jeep up with bricks.

If you watch "This Old House" or any of those DIY shows, they always do it the super professional way, where they dig like 50 feet deep, bring in truckloads of gravel, and make sure the whole thing is level and even. I didn't really care if this path stood the test of time, I just wanted to do one, so here is my process:

1. Mark the area for the path with stakes and string to make it straight
2. Dig out the vegetation and some dirt (about 4 to 6 inches deep)
3. Rake it to make it more or less level
4. Use a large board to flatten it down
5. Lay down a thin layer of sand
6. Put down the bricks as evenly as possible
7. Dump dirt and sand over bricks to fill in the gaps

When I told a coworker about it, he asked how deep I dug the path, and I said 6 inches. He then scoffed as he said, "You'll get frost heaves."

Listen, buddy, I'm not planning on driving on this thing. It's in the very back of my yard, it's for my own personal enjoyment, so BACK OFF! Not all of us have an abundance of resources, like time and money. He's also the type that hires contractors for everything, probably even to change a lightbulb. This whole project costed about 200 bucks, counting gas on the brick trips. Obviously, it took a lot of time, too, but that was half the fun.

Anyway, I am EXTREMELY proud of it and I think it looks great. It took a lot of time and I think it adds a lot of character to what once was an unruly, overgrown outdoor space. Now it's divided into sections, and we can do a different theme in each little section.

Here are some "Work in Progress" pics:

I put this section in on a rainy weekend, so it was extra muddy. I'm a little worried about this part because it was so squishy when I put it down, but it seemed to be fine after things dried out. You can see the board I used to flatten out the path leaning on the wood pile.

You can see how dirty the path was, mostly because I piled dirt on top of it and just left it there for months. It worked, too, by the time I sprayed it off, there weren't many loose bricks, they were all cemented in pretty good.

5. Planted 3 trees and 8 bushes, and put up an arbor

The trees
1. Jonathan Apple
2. White Pine
3. Vesuvius Plum (no picture)

The bushes:
1. Mophead Hydrangea
2. 3 raspberry bushes
3. 4 climbing rose bushes

The north border of our grass has all these large rocks that are too big to move. The whole area looks pretty unruly because weeds and dirt get in there and it doesn't really look that good. Because there are patches of dirt in there, I had the idea to plant raspberry bushes next to it and hopefully they will grow over the whole area and obscure the ugliness. You can't see the bushes, but 3 of them are planted in there.

I've planted 4 trees in all here, but 3 of them I planted last year. They are the trees with the white wrapping around the trunk in the foreground. From front to back: Jonathan, Granny Smith, Golden Delicious, Peach. The Jonathan was the one I planted this year. I ordered it online, it was shipped bare root, so it pretty much looks like a stick. Little buds have started forming this week, so I'm excited that it's still alive.
I also bought a mophead hydrangea bush online, shipped bareroot. I'm a little worried about this one because it's in the shade. I put it here so it would eventually help hide the air conditioner and meter. It gets a few hours of sunlight in the morning, and it looks like it's still alive, so I'm hopeful.


Here's a White Pine, also shipped bare root. This is supposed to grow to as much as 60 feet. I planted in the back, near the stump of the big dead tree we took down, as a replacement to hopefully be the big tree in the back.
And, finally, the arbor. It wasn't too hard to put together, although digging the holes and anchoring it in cement was kind of a pain. The soil right here is extremely compacted from the horses, so digging a foot down was a major ordeal. Also in this picture are the 4 climbing rose bushes we bought. The instructions for that was to dig a 18"by18"by18" hole, but there was no way I was digging down 18 inches. They are growing nicely so far, so I'm excited about that.
This picture above is also a good representation for the "After" picture of the vegetable garden. Now, if you look at the one below, you will see what this land looked like after winter:

Ugly!

Now looking back the other way, you can see our garden, with a trench in the middle of it. It is raised a few inches off the original ground, using soil I dug up from the brick path. The front part of the garden will be corn, squash, peas, beans, and tomatoes (hopefully). The back part (darker) will be pumpkins and watermelons, if we're lucky.
My next project is to dig a trench around the whole veggie garden and install a fence to keep out the critters that supposedly wreak havoc on gardens in this area. Beware of the curse of the Were-Rabbit!

Anyway, there it all is. I shall hopefully continue to take pictures and update you on the progress.