Patio Possibilities and the Backyard Breakdown

Is it an 'M', a bow, a snake, a mustache?

 The spring and summer of 2016 should have just been known as the season of backyard folly.  As the need for a larger open space in our immediate backyard vicinity had diminished, I thought it would be an appropriate time to consider expanding our usable garden area and give some new life to the ole' asphalt patio that we inherited with the house.  After years of canine path-making, soccer practice, and just general wear, it was time to give new life to moss/grass/mud that had become our backyard.  Our garden area had been pretty minimal before and with the wild motivation of volunteer tomato starts over the last few years, they always seemed to take over whatever garden area there was.  Little did I know what was to come.  My first plan was twofold; nearly double our garden space by bringing the 'wall' out from the house and start the with a somewhat clean slate on the remaining grassy area.

To do this, I first started by uprooting the existing wall of roman block stones and lining them up in the potential new configuration.  There was enough of the original wall to lay down a first layer but with the slope of the ground and a desire to raise the garden area a bit more above the grass, I went and purchased about 70 more blocks.  At first, I went to the local manufacturer, Mutual Materials, with my plan but the salesman was kindly honest enough to admit that the prices I could get at Home Depot were better than ordering through them at retail price, at least for the Roman Block to finish the wall.  I took his advice and did so, making my first mistake of the season.  After laboriously loading 70+ blocks into the old Subaru (and making sure they were evenly spaced throughout much of the car to balance the load) and again unloading them at home, I realized I had reversed the count of which ones I needed and purchased much more of the interior blocks (the ones with oval-like ridges) than caps (no ridges).  At that point, I took the easy road and just broke up the few caps I had with the regular interlocking blocks and interspersed them along the wall.  I'm sure it looks totally natural.

After getting the wall set, mostly level, and in place, it was time to build up the garden area.  For this I planned on using some existing soil that I had on site and also whatever I could contribute from our oft neglected compost bin.  But first, let me back up a slight bit.  Before putting the permanent wall down, I wanted to take the opportunity to loosen up the existing garden soil and also prep the remaining lawn for a makeover.  So, I purchased an electric roto-tiller to do the trick.  I remember having to roto-till my parent's garden every year with our old gas tiller and for some reason, that was a chore I actually did enjoy.  Perhaps it was a matter of wrestling with the tiller to keep it in line at the same time as laying down a swath of destruction behind you but something just made it fun.  Needless to say, I was looking forward to this part.  The tiller worked wonderfully even though it didn't have the half-combusted exhaust smell that was part of my childhood reminiscence (and which probably killed a few brain cells).  My Trusty Assistant enjoyed watching the tilling but didn't want to try his hand just yet.  Little does he know that there are several years of gardening left, ha!  After getting the wall in place, and adding a second level to raise the garden bed area a bit, I was short on gardening soil so I cleaned out what we had been composting in the side bins and added it to the garden.  Now, I'm a lazy composter and don't like to regularly turn the mulch so, while my compost looked like some pretty good dirt, it was harboring all sorts of volunteer plants just waiting for their chance in the sun.  Indeed they got it and before we knew it, we had dozens and dozens of squash starts all over the area where I'd added our compost.  Needless to say, between them and the volunteer tomato and tomatillo plants, we weren't able to grow much else.  This spring I will be much more judicious in pulling early starts out before they take over everything else.

Along with the garden improvement, I also wanted to transform our oh-so-lovely asphalt back patio into something a bit nicer so I scratched out a plan for an intermixing of materials to make the space a bit more hospitable.  At first, my idea was to use man-made flagstones for a more geometric design and intersperse the lightly used spaces with river-rock.  After checking material prices at Mutual Material, I decided to look at another route. This led to more searching online for some good landscaping materials sources, and I put in an order with Portland Rock and Landscape Supply.  Their online catalog seemed pretty descriptive and clear to sizing and their online calculator was helpful to determine how much I would need.  For the brick fire circle, I already had some Hidden Brick (some pretty cool local history there) for accents but I was short quite a bit to complete the whole ring.  On Craigslist, I found someone in Beaverton that had whole backyard that had at one point been bricked over and she wanted it all gone, free for the taking if you were willing to put in the labor.  So, I called my father-in-law to enlist his help and his truck and made a day out of it.  Using two five-gallon buckets we made several trips from the driveway to the backyard to eventually get about 120+ beautiful red clay bricks.  There were probably another 500 or more still in that backyard but we were both worn out and in need of a cold McMenamin's beer.  If I thought that hauling brick was work, I was in for a real treat when the stone arrived.

When I placed the order for the flagstone and river rock, the salesman said that while delivery was free, he would need to charge me labor time to unload the flagstones because of their size and weight.  I assumed this meant there would probably be at least a two-man crew to unload the rocks when they got here.  When the truck and dump-trailer arrived, I was surprised to greet a man, maybe ten years younger than myself, and a good six inches shorter, and probably not much over 150 lbs.  That was the crew.  When I went around back to take a look at the rock, I realized I had under-estimated their size based on the online description and that these suckers were going to be heavy.  But, the driver twas there with the rock so I offered to help unload.  I was informed that The largest stone, which happened to be on top had to be loaded at the site by a forklift.  I don't know how we managed, but eventually we got it all unloaded and placed behind the fence.  Afterwards he lifted the dump-trailer into the driveway and took off.  Knowing that my wife would be home soon and would need to park the car there, I knew this was going to be real fun.  Using buckets as shovels, my Trusty Assistant and I got all the river rock also behind the fence and the parking area cleared.

Over the next couple days, my wife helped me move some of the stones into place and I log-rolled some of the larger ones by myself with a pry bar.  It took several weeks of placing river rock in the empty spaces during which I was able to learn all of that summer's pop hits due to the only portable radio being one with a broken tuner and I could only get the top 40 hit station.  Justin Timberlake gave me so much damn sunshine in my pocket that it burned my leg.  As I went, I back filled empty space with masonry sand to keep the smaller rocks and bricks from moving and then finished by filling the top with a polymeric sand filler to lock things in place.  By then, summer was mostly over and I didn't quite get to finishing the brick steps but hey, I have to have something to do this spring, right?