Gravel Party

So recently Kass and I decided to allocate some of our savings for each of us to do something fun with. Kass wanted to do a project with her portion, so I jokingly mentioned that she should create a presentation to pitch to me as the “investors”. She actually was pretty excited about this and proceeded to put together a pitch with plenty of inspiration photos, mockups and a budget. Needless to say the investors were blown away and fully funded the project.

A few months later, the ground is levelled, weed barrier installed. The last thing to do before filling the new garden boxes was to lay an inch or two of pea gravel to match the addition to the existing garden. So we had 8 cubic yards delivered from a local family owned excavation company. Unfortunately the truck driver was not willing to drive onto our yard to drop the gravel directly into the garden, so it was dropped in our driveway. I learned from the owner of the company that a yard of pea gravel weighs around 2.5k lbs on average, so that meant we had about 20k lbs of gravel sitting on our driveway 😱

The task of manually moving all that gravel into the garden was daunting… We considered renting something like a skid steer, but we really wanted to stick to the budget as closely as possible! Plus we think the sweat equity is well worth the work. So last Friday we invited some folks over to help us move it all! We came up with a workflow where 3 people would move the gravel using wheelbarrows, 1 would stay in the garden and spread each pile, and 2 others would stay at the pile helping to load the wheelbarrows. This strategy allowed us to keep up a steady stream of gravel moving into the garden. After working hard for ~1.5 hours without any significant breaks (just keeping hydrated) we were done!!! It was an amazing feat of teamwork and efficiency 🙌. After we enjoyed some pizza, drinks and board games well into the night 🍻.

The best way to envision all the work that went into this is to check out this video Kass posted on instagram

Thank you so much to everyone who helped make our garden what it is today - both in it’s first iteration and it’s new improved form. We love you all! ❤️