Garden Club of Cape Coral | Building a Florida Friendly Garden, part 5
By MERYL O’ROURKE
news@breezenewspapers.com
Hello fellow gardener, welcome back! I’ve finally begun work on my front walkway, and like everything else that I’ve tackled with this garden makeover, it’s become a much larger project than first imagined.
Gardens consist of many different areas. Flowers and plants make up a large amount, that’s true. There are supporting characters that complete the play, and walkways are a big part of that show. They can be a straight-through, no-nonsense type of path, or a softly curving, meandering, take-your-time trail. I’ll be taking mine from no nonsense to meandering.
As you can see from the photo, it’s a very unimaginative path. Red brick, bordered with white brick, coming up to 6-inch red pavers that make up an entry to the front door……boring. Here’s the “fun” part – the concrete. The white brick only has concrete down the side where it sits against the red brick, so it’s not too bad. The rest of the bricks were set into a concrete bed. So, I definitely have my work cut out for me in removing those bricks!
The front yard will have a round pad with a bottle tree in the middle of it, with the pad being made from the recycled bricks from the yard. The pathway will lead to that pad, as well. The previous owners used the white bricks as garden edging, and I’ve been digging and collecting hundreds of them for future use! My plan is to reuse as many of the bricks as I possibly can.
The new path will start approximately 8 feet to the right of the current edge, past the tall blue pot. It will be curvy, heading out into the yard and then winding back towards the front door, almost as if I had dropped a worm on paper. I’ll be using a combination of circular and crescent moon shape large pavers, set on sand.
I’ll be trying to use the pea gravel that’s already in the area to set around the pavers. You can see it in the photo on both sides of the pathway. It’s the same pea gravel that I had to dig out in Part 2 of this garden adventure. There’s the digging of the pea gravel, the straining of the dirt from it, and the washing of it, prior to being able to use it around the pavers. And where do you keep it? I’ve purchased buckets from Lowe’s to store them all in. At first, I was hesitant about spending the money to do that. After all, I’m trying to do this removal as inexpensively as possible and save money towards plant purchases. However, I always seem to require multiple buckets in my various garden projects, whether it’s propagating or cleaning up, so they’ll come in handy somewhere in the garden.
It will be interesting to see how many of the bricks I’ll be able to save during the demo. I’ll report back in my next column and hope to have a picture of the completed path to show you!
Meryl O’Rourke, a UF/IFAS Master Gardener, volunteers at the Berne Davis Botanical Garden and the Goodwill Pathways to Opportunity Food Garden.