Our soil here is clay. When clay gets wet, it doesn’t just get muddy, it turns into a slimly slippery sole sucking mess. (Sorry, that was #punintentional.) Walking through the yard after rain usually results in 3 extra pounds of clay sticking to each foot.

When we have chickens, we will be heading out to the coop rain or shine, so I decided we needed a fairly mud-free path to the coop. I dug in bricks as a border, then filled the path with decomposed granite. The fines in the decomposed granite will settle down and make a firm base for the path. To help the compacting and settling of the path, I used this 10″x10″ tamper. This is also a good workout. Starting to think the title of this blog should be “Of Chickens, Craft, and Calories”.

I’ve made the half of the path that leads to the gate. When we know exactly where our coop doors will be, I’ll lay the other half of the path.