Pavement Project

 

Before

 

After



  



So, our driveway flower bed was not exactly screaming "Welcome", with the weeds, hidden cigarette butts (pet hate!) and all sorts of other bits and bobs that had been hiding under the thick, tangled, weedy mess. One night we got home to find a random suitcase hiding in the weeds in the flower bed. We very cautiously opened it to make sure it wasn't full of drugs (with our neighbours... anything is possible), in which case we would have called the police, but since it seemed to be full of dirty clothes, we quickly placed it on the neighbour's driveway and made our way indoors. Anyways, that was strike one against the dirty driveway...

Finally we had time to make our driveway presentable, and with much dreaming and not so much planning, I came home one day with 3 restio plants (not the variety that we initially wanted, but better than nothing, and cheap, thanks to the NCC landscaping nursery selling extras). That weekend, we went to the Big nursery and bought materials for our pavement project. Unfortunately, eye measurements do not work. We thought that the area that we wanted to work on was 1m x 3 m (all by sight, therefore: eye measurements!!!).

too small!

BUT, after setting out the shade cloth kind of material and our stones on that, we realised that an actual measurement would have meant we'd come home with enough material for 1.5m x 5m!! So, that meant we had to return to the nursery on our next free day, the public holiday. :-) I love that the nursery was open on a public holiday- clever people. We got more material and some succulent flowers to fit in the space that was now too long for only 3 restios... :-)

The hardest and longest part of the process was the weeding! It was backbreaking work, but we managed to salvage some Buffalo grass (to thicken our lawn) and we filled the wheelie bin with the weeds that are too hardy to put on the compost heap. (The compost heap was our first project, in May I think... it is overflowing though- so we should probably make a second one).
After the weeding, we dug up the area, to remove the weeds that wouldn't be pulled, and also to even the area out a bit. We only dug deeper in the areas where we would plant the restios and succulents, and mixed in a bit of compost in those holes... Placing the synthetic material (shade cloth stuff) was more difficult than we anticipated in the Cape Town wind. But after a bit of flapping and throwing rocks onto the edges, we managed to pin it down and cut holes for the plants. This stuff will help us to look after the environment, as it will hopefully prevent weeds from sprouting all over the place, so that we don't need to use awful weedkiller and it will also help to keep the stones in place.
For the first time, we were thankful that our garden is full of rocks, as we used them to make a nice border to contain the stones.

just right!

Well, we are very happy with the result, and we met more neighbours in the process of working on our pavement project. Now we need to remember their names! ;-) we keep saying we will make a little map of our road with the names of the neighbours from the different houses... One day!