How We Maintain Our Gravel Driveway and Keep it Free of Weeds! 🌿 // Garden Answer (2023)

Introduction

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Content

Hey guys how's it going in today's video.

I want to talk about gravel, never thought I'd be making a video about rocks, but we get a lot of questions about it.

So I thought I'd address all those questions in today's video.

So, as you can see behind me- and it's probably pretty bright, we'll get some close-up looks at it here in a minute, but that is our driveway and it goes all the way around our property and our property is two acres, so it covers quite a large area and then the garden I'm standing in right here.

We call this versailles and this is our other large graveled area that we maintain so first off.

Let me just talk about the types of gravel we have here.

So in this garden we have a pea, gravel, it's not round, though it's crushed and that's really helpful, because it packs a lot better.

The round, pea, gravel pea gravel is hard to walk in it.

Doesn't it doesn't create a really firm base and the reason I went with this as opposed to going to the stuff we have in the driveway is because there was already pea gravel in this area, and I didn't really want to go with a complete change.

I just thought: well, let's just kind of go with the size.

That's there.

That's way that way it's easier to patch and we don't have to like buy as much gravel.

So anyway, I think it was in the beginning.

It was more of a kind of a blue gray color when we moved in and it was pretty thin in some areas and it was more rounded and then we had this crushed pea gravel put over the top of it, and it's looking really good in here and then, let's go out to the driveway and I'll show you what that kind of gravel is so our gravel here is a three-quarter chip in the color blue.

I don't know if it has another name like a specific name.

It goes by, but this is what our guide that does our gravel said.

It was called.

I really like it, you can see in the shade it's got more like charcoal cool tones to it.

When you look in the sun, it definitely picks up more of a lighter appearance.

You can see a little bit more of the brown and kind of orange hues, but it's my favorite color that I've seen so far.

We did have other gravel installed in the same size, three-quarter chip in front of our hay racks.

It's much lighter.

It has more kind of yellow and oranges in it, and it was only stuff that was available at the time they didn't have any of this in stock, so we just went with it.

I don't like it as much as this, but in the future, if we ever need to redo that, like touch it up, we can hopefully come in with this color and start incorporating this in a little bit more.

When we moved in three and a half years ago, it needed to be redone.

There were bare spots everywhere, you know tire tracks, there was thin areas and it looked really bad and you know when we do videos and projects.

When we take pictures and things, we need things to look kind of tidy and put together, and so that was one of the first things that we did.

It cost about five thousand dollars for somebody to come in, they kind of regraded the whole thing smoothed it all out and then brought in new gravel and did everything our parking area, not versaille, but all of our driveway area and parking, and so that's just something that we'll have to do every once in a while, we'll probably be able to just do patchwork for a while, like every couple of years have a little bit of gravel brought in and just put in on the thinner spaces.

You know the stuff that gets more activity, because when you move out toward this, you know nobody's driving over here.

So the rocks don't get moved around like they do in areas where people drive, and I tell everybody that comes in to drive slow and if they drive fast.

I tell them: I'm gonna come at you with a rake and you're gonna fix all of the little tire marks that you just made because it's expensive to keep up something like this.

I don't anticipate having to spend that much money.

You know for several years, but maybe like every 10 years or so is my guess to have to do a complete redo, which is not horrible, and it's something once you know what you're in for you can kind of save and budget for that and know when it's coming.

As far as what is underneath the gravel, I have seen a lot of questions asking whether or not we do landscape fabric under it, because we don't visibly, there are weeds, but there's not a ton of them.

There is no landscape fabric under any of the rocks.

Here I only use landscape fabric under our arborvitae hedge and our boxwood hedging, because we have bindweed, really bad and if I don't suppress that bindweed I may as well not have hedges and I can't spray it because it's a broad leaf and it'll kill my hedges.

So anyway, that's the only place.

I use landscape fabric right here I mean it goes from rocks right down to soil.

You can see right there and it's actually not very thick in this spot, but this soil is very compacted because this has been laid out this way for as long as I know so.

This has been driveway for, however many years and this soil, I mean it's hard for some weeds to grow.

The weeds we deal the most with are spurge purslane, puncture vine bindweed.

Those are the four vining type weeds that are just they're hard to keep under control and I'll show you examples of most all of those here in the driveway and then kosha is the other one, and that's a taller weed that if you let it go, it'll turn into like huge christmas tree, sized weeds, um and so in the fall like right.

Now, it's not as big of a problem, because it's cooler at night, it's cooler during the days the growth rate of everything has slowed down quite dramatically, but in the spring you have to keep up on a weekly maintenance schedule and we do spray.

Let's go back into versailles and I'll show you what we've been using.

So this is what I use it's called burnout.

It actually is for organic gardening.

It's a non-selective weed, killer, translation.

It means it kills everything.

So if you have a broadleaf weed coming up in a grassy area like this, and you want to selectively spray that weed out, you would not want to use this because this will kill everything.

This is really good for open areas like gravel, like this, the driveway any pathway or paver patio situation any cracks in sidewalks.

This is a really good one for that.

So we've been using this on our property.

For a little over a year now, aaron started to experiment.

With this last fall about the time we started working with bonnie and bonnet actually emailed us, and they were like.

Did you realize that there is an organic option for weed spray? For, like your gravel driveway- and you know, I knew that there was some organic options on the market and such I tried a few without a whole lot of results, but I never tried this one so this spring, I put it to the test.

What I didn't realize is that you can mix this at different percentage rates usually like.

I would just skim a label and just find the first rate.

It told me and just mix up my spray solution that way.

But if you look here in the label- and maybe we can put this up on the screen- but there's a little chart telling you if you want a three percent solution- a six percent or a nine percent- so it's probably why I didn't have success in the past, because I wasn't mixing it properly to kill what I needed to kill so when you're killing puncture vines or bindweed, which are horribly noxious terrible weeds to deal with.

You definitely want to go with a 9 solution, so once I started mixing it at that, I'm getting some really good results.

Now with this, this is not a roundup.

So it's not going to kill like a roundup, but you have to weigh your pros and cons here like.

I would rather have to hit a weed twice to kill it rather than put chemical like toxins into my soil.

I also have cats and I have a baby that run around our garden and I want something: that's safe and one other thing before I mix it up.

It is rain proof or waterproof within an hour of spraying.

I, though, personally feel like you want to spray on a nice day like a day like today, is perfect.

There's no wind! That's really important! You want to spray on a still day so that there's no mist of spray accidentally hitting something that you don't want to harm, but I like to give it several hours to dry and really soak into the weed before it's touched with any water.

I feel like the.

If you got it wet like one hour after you sprayed it, it could reduce the effectiveness a little bit and that's just personal opinion, but it's safe for your kids and pets after it's dry, so you can spray it in an hour later, everybody can be outside and it's totally safe, okay, so to do a nine percent solution for one gallon.

That's all I'm going to mix up in my four gallon sprayer here in the spring.

I have to fill this thing once or twice in order to actually tackle everything on our property right now I can mix up like one gallon at a time and I might have a little bit left over, but it takes on the chart here for a 9 solution.

It takes 12 ounces, so we order these little clear cups right here that have ounces on the side and we can just toss them every time.

We're done that way.

We don't accidentally mix up something wrong and I label every single one of our sprayers, because we do have different sprayers for insecticide and fungicide versus our burnout.

I wouldn't want to accidentally mix up bt to spray on my supertunias in a burnout container, but that would be bad news.

I would not have any super tunis left mercy.

Okay, I got the lid off.

I had to have aaron's help for that.

So now we want to measure out 12 ounces, so that's eight ounces right there and four more.

I wish the companies would make the gallon marks a lot more apparent on these things.

I hate that they're the same color there that's perfect now.

Obviously this is a huge sprayer.

So if you live on a smaller size lot somewhere, you probably would only need a one or a two gallon pump sprayer, and that would do you just fine.

I just use this one because our property kind of demands it and it is heavy when I put four gallons of water in here it about, knocks me down backwards.

Okay, so now we're going to go out and find some weeds, I'm going to show you what I spray here on our property.

This is the pump right here.

This is what builds up the pressure in my tank and then my sprayer right here and most of them come with different spray tips that you can adjust depending on what you want.

If you want like more of a mist or a more of a fine stream, you can mess with that.

I did see like right here.

We don't have a ton of weeds right now, but here is an example of what purslane is it's a little succulent thick-leaved flat-growing weed, I think they're actually edible, but once they take hold in seed in here they just spread everywhere.

So we are going to spray it boom done and you want to spray it like that to where the whole plant is wet and dripping.

Okay, let's go find some spurge it'll be easy.

Oh here's, some more purslane! You see it's right on the edge of our grass, so I'm going to be very careful and I'm just going to spray the purslane and this stuff does not translocate.

So it's not going to spread and kill the grass.

It needs to make contact with the foliage this right here and they're hard to see.

Sometimes this is a spurge, so this looks an awful lot like purslane, except for it's a really flat leaf.

It's not a succulent, and these are prolific around here and you'll- get weeds like this- that, if you don't keep like get them when they're this small, I mean these spurge will grow out.

This big, like there'll, be one little root in the center and then this huge plant now, obviously, if you live on a small lot, you've got a small size garden.

The best route to get rid of your weeds is just to hand pull them, not spray them, and you know at this point of the year I probably could go through and just hand pull in the spring, though like this area in particular, this is a really problem area and this will be thick with spurge and everything I'm telling you guys today is just for our gravel and open areas and not for flower beds.

I hand pull all the weeds in the flower beds all right.

So, let's head up front, I saw a huge puncture vine up there.

Yesterday.

Can you guys see the difference in color here in the gravel? This is the blue, and this is the other stuff we had to have installed see the difference like how much lighter that gravel is compared to our actual driveway.

I, like that stuff, much better, hey rocks you're.

Looking pretty look at all that color, I forget, I don't have to yell.

I have my microphone on alright, so here's the puncture vine check out how huge this one has grown.

Now.

This one may require two spray applications at the nine percent solution.

It might just be the one, but typically if you can get a hold of your weeds when they're smaller they're a lot easier to control this one's blooming and setting seed already, which is bad news.

I don't know if you guys are familiar with puncture vines, but they we also call them goat heads and they produce these horrible spiny, thorny seeds, and they get stuck in your bike tires.

I remember as a kid I get them all over.

My bike tires in the bottoms of our shoes and you track them all over the place and they spread that way really easily and their seeds remain viable for over five years I mean probably longer than that they can sprout up all over the place.

So you really want to get control of these before they take hold.

So I'm going to go ahead and spray this one down really well now, in a case like this, you could pull it.

You know, because it's one puncture vine and there's not a whole bunch of other weeds going on.

So this wouldn't be a hard job, but I just wanted to show you what it would look like if you were spraying all right.

That looks good.

I also see a button weed right here and take care of that.

These have a really long tap root, sometimes they're easy to pull, but out here in the dry soil.

This would probably break off at ground level and the plant would keep growing so in some cases it's better to spray than to pull.

So this right here is kosher.

This one wants to grow huge, like this, isn't even as big as they can get.

This is actually in a pasture on this side here.

This is the side we've been taking care of, and we like to keep it as free of weeds as possible, because if we didn't we would have puncture vines bind weed.

We would have these just growing all over the place.

In fact, I think we have some footage or a picture of what the pasture looked like right in front of our hay racks.

When we very first installed them, I mean there was weeds that first year, I don't even think we had the hay racks installed yet, but the weeds went all the way to the fence and you couldn't even see the fence.

They were so thick and then we started maintaining you know like 20 feet or so and put some gravel in to keep it nice and clean.

So weeds can be a huge problem and I know um like it's hard to know how to attack, but this is what we found really helpful, so we do burn out once a week in the spring.

It's just kind of a routine.

We strap this thing on.

We go around our gravel areas and what I do is I take like a a four foot, uh width- and I just like eyeball the four foot width and then I turn around when I get to the end- and I do the next four foot width, and sometimes it can take a couple of hours right now, since the weeds are so few and they're very small, it can take like 30 minutes and you can whip through the driveway really quick, and then we keep on top of everything and we don't have any big problems so anyway.

I can't think of any other questions that we've seen about the gravel, but I do see a lot like how do you keep your gravel free from weeds? How do you keep it clean? Is there landscape fabric? What kind of gravel do you use? So I hope this was helpful, just seeing our process and seeing the gravel up close and the colors.

The only other thing I can think of is like leaf debris and we use our blower.

We have a dewalt battery operated blower that we take in here and we can blow most everything into a nice big, pile and pick it up, and so after a big storm or something like that, we'll go through or in the fall of course, and we'll use the blower to slick up the gravel, and that way we don't have to use a rake on most of it and it keeps the gravel in place so anyway.

I hope this video was helpful.

Thank you guys so much for watching, and we will see you in the next one bye.