What a load of old cobbles

Last week, my neighbour’s landlord made good his promise to deliver to me a load of cobbles that he had no use for. He had been saving them for a project, but there were not enough of them in the end, so he said I could have them. Of course, once they had arrived, it proceeded to rain non stop for the rest of the week. This weekend has been the first opportunity for me to do something with them.

My plan was originally just to build a proper path from my doorstep to the patio, but there were considerably more cobbles than I had envisaged. Indeed, I have enough to encircle the whole patio with the smallest sized ones alone, or at least I could if there were more room between the patio flags and the step. To do that now, would mean shifting the whole circle a few inches towards the house, and I’m not doing that. However, I will curse silently inside instead. Had I known I would have these, I could have accommodated them in to the design, instead I will have to do a botch job and see if I can get away with it.

Yesterday I took up the temporary path, laid down a liner and roughly laid out the cobbles. Today I levelled up the path with sand, relaid the cobbles, cut cobbles to fit, and laid cobbles around half of the patio – removing the gravel as I went. The main reason for replacing the gravel between the patio and the ‘lawns’ was that I knew when I laid it that it was going to be difficult stopping the gravel from spreading in to the lawn, and this seemed to be the best fix.

As an extra, I used some of the biggest ones laid on their side to mark out a new raised bed. This will be a new garden – since I name my individual flower beds a garden in their own right to compensate for having such a small real estate folio. My aim is to have edible things planted in it. It is small, only 9" deep and 3’ long, but it does get the sun from 11am onwards.

As a final gesture, I reseeded the patch between the patio and the house with grass seed. This will probably be the smallest lawn in the known universe, but I hang on to having one. Psychologically, a lawn means my garden is a garden, and not a back yard. I dare say that it will annoy me to the n’th degree, it’s hardly worth owning a mower, hair clippers would do a better job, but for now the lawn remains a feature.

The patio building saga starts here – Long, long ago…