Today started at 5:45 a.m.  I cleaned the kitchen; afterward we had pumpkin scones for breakfast and then hooked up the dump trailer and headed out to the local gravel pit.

For folks who have never hauled their own gravel, let me explain the process. We drive our truck and dump trailer to the nearby gravel pit, and we immediately drive onto a huge cement bridge type thing (called a scale) which weighs our truck/trailer combo empty and records that weight. We tell the man at the front in this little one room building what we want to buy, and he waves us on up the hill.

We park by the type of gravel we want and wait. Someone driving a huge loader comes over, and we hold up four fingers to indicate we want four ton.  He scoops it up and then pours it into our dump trailer. We drive back to the scale and get weighed again; this weight is subtracted from our initial empty weight, and that shows how many exact tons we got, and then we pay for exactly what we got.

Then we head home, dump the gravel (the dump trailer has a little remote that raises and lowers the end of the trailer nearest the truck so the gravel just slides out the back end), and then Ted uses the tractor to spread the gravel out.

We got nine tons today, and we need at least that much more to finish just the top third of the driveway.

We also went to a second stone seller and bought five tons of pea gravel to create walkways around the raised beds and pathways through the garden areas!