Overburden.

The mild weather (is it really summer?) has been great and I've taken advantage of it by finishing off some outdoor projects this week. The big job was to extend the urbanite pathway that I started building last fall (I ran out of concrete chunks and ambition at about the same time, so put it off for a season). Instead of collecting more urbanite, I stumbled across a local source for slate flagstone to use instead. This material is overburden from the nearby iron mining operations- basically the surface material that must be excavated to get to the iron-rich ore below. A company has set up shop only 2 miles from Green Gate, splitting the slate boulders into various sizes of slabs for landscaping projects. We got a few crates like this:

With the larger pieces pushing 200 pounds each, I stood no chance of moving them by hand. So, I bought a 2-wheeled dolly and used it to transport and position each stone in its new home (this worked great!). I filled in the remainder of the site with some hardwood bark mulch. The finished path, including a little buggy-bench sitting area, turned out like this:

Next year we'll plant some greenery....