Now that our flurry of concerts is over... with only an education workshop this coming weekend, my wife and I were able to set our minds and backs to getting the recently enclosed area weed matted and covered in rock mulch before my father-in-law got ahead of us with the construction of the raised veggie beds!

We have learnt our lesson with some of the other areas where we have mulched with stones and gravel... we should have probably put down a layer of weed-matting first... for the playground, I had put down a double layer... and that seems to work well, but for other places, we had left it alone... and now grass and weeds are starting to poke through the stone layers! So, we will have to scrap the stones and do it again with the weedmats.

We do prefer to use a biodegradable weed mat... I had read that the plastic ones will just tear and degrade anyway... but you are left with plastic fragments everywhere... so, better to just use something that will just decay into the soil instead. Yes, we will need to redo them in the future... but as far as I understand, that isn't any different from the plastic ones anyway!

All laid out and pinned down (with biodegradable pins even!).... it does feel weird to be laying out the fabric weedmat... it is like making a bed! Only a single layer here, we ran out of weedmats... we have a large order of it coming in, but we are going to use a thicker layer of gravel here, so we figured it would be okay.

The original plan was to use the white decorative gravel... the same as what we used for the playground. It is much more expensive, and bright white... plus the stones are larger. But in the end, my wife wanted to use that for the path around the house... sigh, much more expensive. And the gray little river gravel stones that WERE for the path would now be used for the garden bedding instead. Sigh... this stuff is much cheaper...

I bring them up in buckets as that makes for easier emptying when you are lifting them up over the retaining wall...

You do have to make a start... and the first barrow-load got us this far.

... but by the end of the day, we had the entire thing filled up! Yay, we are now ready for our father-in-law! With some time to spare... which means that I will likely be heading back around to the front to fix up the bits that we had already rock-mulched... without the weedmat. We will need to scrape it up, weed it a bit... and then lay the new weedmats, and then cover it back up again! Small sections at a time... annoying, but it needs to be done.

Handy Crypto Tools

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CoinList: Access to early investor and crowdsale of vetted and reserached projects.
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KuCoin: I still use this exchange to take part in the Spotlight and Burning Drop launches.
MEXC: Accepts HIVE, and trades in most poopcoins! Join the casino!
ByBit: Leverage and spot trading, next Binance?
OkX: Again, another Binance contender?