i was hoping after getting some weeding done earlier in the day and then taking a break of getting back out and working on the end of the driveway to get it back into shape again, but Mom had other ideas and didn't want me to do that so i finally got the screen box back out there along the pathway so i could get some of the gravel ouf of that garden. it's only been 10-15 years since i put it there to begin with (which i found out later was a big mistake). if you've ever tried to weed compacted gravel and mostly clay soil you'd know what i mean.
today will be much the same, start off by a few hours of weeding until i get tired or hot enough (won't be too hot to start since it did manage to get down into the high 40sF last night - it was really cold out there when i went out to fill up the birdbaths this morning) and then take a break and then a few hours of screening dirt/gravel.
i only have a few more hills of mostly gravel with a little dirt left to do which is much easier than the gravel i have in some other spots where i've piled it to eventually get screened too. considering how much time i do spend when i'm weeding or working in this garden anyways picking up the gravel out of the garden soil it does end up saving me a lot of time to spend a few hours all at once to screen it out, plus it returns the gravel back to the pathway where it belongs. with the several thousand square feet of gravel pathways and decorative areas and all the edges picking gravel out of gardens is a pretty normal event and i do have to do a lot of it, but in the case of gravel in the dirt in gardens where i'm trying to grow vegetables and also keep them weeded it's pretty hard to use a stirrup hoe for weeding if there is gravel and clay mixed together.
at first when i had all this gravel and dirt mixed together it was from another area where i had to lift and replace the gravel and there was no way i wanted to put the dirt and gravel back where it came from, so i thought i would just put it along this edge and i'd gradually pick the rocks out of the dirt as the rains cleaned it up. well after a year i decided to plant some irises in that instead and it worked nicely enough for a few years until the weeds started getting into those irises and it was really hard to get the weeds out of there if they had a chance to get started. thistles and sow thistles were the worst and what made me decide finally after many years to remove the irises and to get that gravel out of there at last. i did get a lot of it removed last year and the year before but now i'm working on the half that is further back which hasn't had as much effort put into it and rescuing the gravel to be reused for some other place eventually is also worth the time spent. we did pay to have the gravel brought in to begin with and i moved many tons of it so the idea of just leaving it mixed in the garden soil didn't appeal to me either aside from the problems it causes with trying to weed or just the looks of it. nope, it had to come out of there...
it may take a few more rounds of screening eventually to get it really back into shape completely, but not having so much gravel available to easily mix in with the neighboring garden soil will also keep the chaos level down. we'll see how it turns out...
