Linda likes her front yard of native grasses and wild flowers, but it's difficult to get from the front of the house -- the porch or the sidewalk -- to the other side of the front yard -- the water hose -- because of all the grass and flowers.
So the thought is to put a path that runs from the stairs in the retaining wall by the sidewalk to the water faucet at the corner of the house. While we discussed a rock path, we are uncertain about it, so our first approach is to just put down mulch to make a path. If that works out, we can come back and put down stone.
The other problem is that the ground in the front yard continues to subside. My explanation for that is that the dirt that we put in had a high compost ratio, and as the compos decomposes, the level of the lawn sinks. To counter that, we first want to bring in more dirt, to get the path level back to where we want the front yard to be.
We are buying the dirt from Home Depot -- Texas Native Enriched Topsoil at $2.87 for a 40 pound bag. The path is about 40 feet long, so I estimate I will need 46 bags, and it will take 3 trips to get it all.
One advantage of this approach is that it allows us to lay out the path in 40 pound chunks which can be moved to get the shape we want.
Linda decided the path should bend out a bit more.
And once the path was located in place, we could see that it would have a negative impact on the irrigation system -- cutting one of the central sprinkler heads off from the front of the yard. So we decided to split the line and add another head on the other side of the new path.
First we dig out from the existing irrigation line to where we want the new head to be.
Then we cut into the existing line and add a Tee to run water to the new head.
We run the new line out to where the head will be.
Screw in the new head -- the same sort of head as all the other front yard heads; we had a couple of spares -- and then put all the excavated dirt back over the new line.
With that taken care of, and the new path in it's approved location, we can start removing the plastic bags from the dirt and leaving only the dirt path behind.
Once we have the dirt path started, we can get the Mulch. We use the standard native hardwood mulch in the 2 cubic feet bags, but find they are cheaper at HEB ($2.99 a bag) instead of Home Depot ($3.67). Ten bags, plus sales tax, comes to $32.37.
With the mulch spread over the new dirt, we have, effectively, a raised path going from the stairway at the sidewalk,
across the yard to the retaining wall near the corner of the house.
The only down side is that it produced a large number of dirty, empty, plastic bags.
But we have a simple dirt/mulch path from the sidewalk across the yard to the water faucet.
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