Posted in Projects to Make, Newspaper, Garden Ideas |
Father’s Day Frugal
June 18th, 2006
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One of the things I have in common with my father is a love of gardening. So, for today’s blog entry, I wanted to share a frugal gardening idea - something that the guys in my life have thought was not only cool and fairly easy to do, but environmentally-friendly. You’ll be using newspaper and used shingles - mine were pulled off a roof, and then used for these projects. One thing I will caution you on - get the shingles WITHOUT the roofing nails attached. Removing the nails from the load of shingle pieces (which I did have to do with a magnetized wand) is NOT fun. 
The process for doing both the garden walkway and the extra parking space are the same:
* Mow or weed whack anything growing in the area that you’ll be covering with shingles. Take it all the way to the ground.
* Cover the area with several layers of newspaper overlapping as you go. This will prevent weeds from growing up where you don’t want them.
* Lay down your shingles. You can do a pattern if you want - or not. I didn’t really do a pattern, but I did put the shingles down in the garden pathway in a way where the shingle edges were all laying in the same two directions - up & down and side to side. (Click on the pictiures - you’ll see what I mean.) I just liked how that looked. I didn’t do that in the parking area. You can see the difference by clicking on the pictures to get a bigger view.
I did check online before doing this in the garden area to make sure that the shingles didn’t put anything into my soil that I didn’t want there. I didn’t find info saying that it would and did find one scientific test that said it didn’t. Your results may vary.
This is the parking space completed. I used the really small shingle pieces on this, putting them down on the bottom “layer” of the shingles. I then covered them with a layer of larger pieces.
These two projects used most of the shingles I got from one small house’s roof. It didn’t really take a lot to do it, and I find that garden area VERY easy to get around in now that this is down. If you do this, feel free to tell me about it at:
http://www.frugalbydesign.com/share.html
I would SO love to hear about it.
Your Frugal Decorating Diva,
Nancy
Daniel on 9 Sep 2007 at 2:27 am: 1
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article s Day Frugal, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.