Pea Please!

Spring is upon us and we've yet to plant our summer garden! I'm hoping to get to that this weekend. In the meantime, we've been working on taming the area around the garden bed.  Here is what our little garden looked like at about this time last year.  The area around the garden is just dirt and while looks o.k. in this picture, it is typically full of unruly weeds.  We’ve been looking for ground cover for this area that looks nice, is low maintenance, and that our cat won't use as her personal litter box.  One option was vegetative ground cover like elfin thyme.  But we have some in the front of our house and it still required quite a bit of weeding.  Since we don't spray any of our landscaping with weed killer, that option didn't work for us.  We have enough hand weeding to keep us busy and the idea is to make less work for ourselves, not more.  

Enter pea gravel!  I debated on whether or not I like the look of pea gravel.  But after hunting down some pictures on Pinterest and weighing our other options we gave it the thumbs up!

As usual the process has been much slower than I anticipated. I though it would be a weekend project, but it's been a little-bit-over-several-weeks project.  The first weekend I spent a day weeding out all around the bed. The next week husband laid down some weed cloth. We spent the last few weeks looking at various options for pea gravel. I like the look of light colored pea gravel, but it seems very difficult to come by in our area. We checked out the options at Home Depot, but they were pretty much non-existent. That was about three weeks ago.  Today we stopped by a fabulous local stone store. They had a large variety of options.  We really liked the coral pea gravel, which is light with orange tones and I think would look really nice against the spanish tile stepping stones.  However, the $200+ price was WAY outside our price range.  Instead we came home with a truck load this pea gravel, which cost a total of $35... for the whole truck load!! And to top it off, it is from a local quarry.  I'm all for supporting local businesses.  


The boys were hard at work unloading the gravel today and here's what our garden looks like now!  I love the results!! Thank you boys for my wonderful Mother's Day present!  Now I need to get started on planting the tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, green beans, peppers, and basil!