The Greenhouse Patio, Part 1

Hello,hivers!

I haven't written very many posts lately because I've been having a hard time coming up with something to write about. In the warmer months, I have a fair amount of stuff to write about, but in the winter, I don't have the garden or other outdoor activities going on, so that leaves me with a lot less to write about. I was thinking about that today, and it occurred to me that I had not written anything about building the greenhouse patio last summer. That seems like a good thing to write about right now, so this post will be the first of several posts about the process of building my greenhouse patio.

I actually started what would become the greenhouse patio in late fall of 2020. I've had winter frost heave problems with the door on the greenhouse every winter since I built the greenhouse in 2016. The ground is pretty close to the level of the bottom of the door, so when the ground freezes, it swells up and interferes with opening the door.

In late fall of 2020, I dug the dirt out of the area in front of the door and replaced it with a layer of gravel. Then I put some 12 inch patio pavers on top of the gravel to give a stable walking surface. The idea was that the gravel drains better than dirt so it won't freeze and heave as much. That bit of effort worked out pretty well, I didn't have the problem with the door that winter.

Here's what that looked like last spring after the snow melted. In case you're wondering, the green rubber backed rug strips keep the grass from growing in that area and also keep the area from being muddy when it rains.

At the beginning of April, I decided to expand the gravel fill down the length of the greenhouse wall to give better drainage along the wall. At this time, I was also starting to build the garden railroad, which I wrote a series of posts about last fall. In this picture you can see the gravel along the greenhouse wall, and also that I'm hauling the dirt away with the railroad car. I'm using the dirt to fill in a depression down by the plum tree.

I didn't do much more work to the patio project until summer. In July, I started expanding the area that I was digging out and replacing with gravel. By that time, the garden railroad was usable for hauling heavy loads, so I was hauling patio pavers for the patio project with the rail car.

The local inspector was checking out my work after putting more pavers in place. As you can see, I was using pea stone as the bedding for the paver blocks. That helps with leveling out the pavers.

At that point, I decided the next step was to make the gravel area wider, or further out from the door. More digging, and more gravel. This was done at the beginning of August.

Then I got another crazy idea for the patio. I decided that I needed it to extend past the corner of the greenhouse for better drainage around the front of the greenhouse. For that part of the project, I had to pull out the end section of garden railroad track and roll back the weed block cloth. It was right where I wanted to dig. I started on this part of the project in the middle of August.

That idea was just the beginning of the madness, it got worse...
I decided to expand on the drainage idea for this area. Here's a hint.

I'll share this part of the project with you in the next post in this series.
I hope you've found this project interesting so far! Thanks for checking it out!