Recycled Timber Path

As you may know, I LOVE collecting and working with rustic timbers. I have previously mentioned the mountain of recycled hardwood timber that we inherited from a local demolition and we have now put it to another fantastic use which will also decrease some of the weeding maintenance that we have to do around the farm!

We have built a recycled timber path to replace our stepping stone pathway to our chook house. This previous path looked amazing to begin with but it required constant weeding and more often than not, just looked terrible.

We took this opportunity to begin our greywater recycling project too in which water from our bathroom sinks, showers, bath as well as our washing machine will all go into a large worm farm (1st Stage) and then overflow into a greywater storage area with gravel and aquatic plants to filter our any remaining pathogens that the worms didn’t take care of. Once it has gone through this process, the filtered water overflow will go into a reed bed system that flows down to our large pond/dam being filtered along the way by more aquatic plants and reeds in the system. The overflow from this dam then flows into our larger dam, ensuring we are recycling and retaining as much water on our property as we can! To build this 2nd stage greywater system, we used some free plastic drums in which I cut in half and then screwed together. I used some treated pine to create a stronger border around the drums so we could then attached some hardwood frames to hide the drums a bit better. Stay tuned for future posts regarding this system!

We decided to build a floating pathway. To do this we leveled out some bricks and used the recycled hardwood joists we had lying around. We wanted to do this so the hardwood was not sitting directly on the ground to avoid the timber coming in contact with the damp soil and causing the wood to rot. We decided to use uneven lengths for a rustic look, it also allowed us to use most of the wood and not have to make as many cuts. We picked up the slate that was on the original path and layed this up the side of the path for a bit of contrast. To avoid weeds coming up through these rocks we laid some carpet offcuts down that we picked up for free as well as much of the cardboard leftover from Christmas presents!

The beauty about this project is that we had everything lying around to make this and the drums, timber, rocks and bricks were all free. The only thing we needed to purchase was some more bugle screws. However, the best thing about this project is the fact that our path weeding days are behind us!! WOO HOO!

Seed you soon!