Category: The Loke

Over the last couple of days, the two rolls of artificial grass we bought, which are left-over pieces from the supplier at half the normal prices. They were 4metre long rolls and about 1metre wide, the plastic grass itself are 30mm long strands in a very dense weave.

We chopped 640mm pieces off each of the rolls which allowed us to get twelve in total, which meant that we could cover just over 12metres strip down the middle of the Loke, between our neighbour’s entrance ways.


The method we decided on, to hold down the material, was to dig out the recycled asphalt material out of the grid cells that runs either side of the 500mm centre strip. Then, each grass section was draped so that the 666mm direction covered across the 500mm width and the ends dropped down into the empty cells. Of course, we had to snip the material at every cell boundary to let it in and then used a cable ties to lock down the flapping pieces to the plastic grid modules themselves and finally, the asphalt granules were pushed back in on top of the excess material to provide more clamping force. Another line of cable ties was used to join the grass sections together, which was repeated as we moved along the Loke.
This is an experiment and we will see how well this style of creating a “green” splash of colour for our Loke will survive over the short and medium terms, before we decide how to continue upgrading and resurfacing the rest of the Loke later.

On several days over the previous couple of weeks, our Loke has been scraped down the middle to remove 2.5metres wide strip of old surface and grass plus dirt. That was taken away by a bloke with a grabber in his 15ton lorry.
We then buried a pipe under the middle of the loke to act as a conduit for any future needs.

Then twelve tons of crushed concrete arrived and distributed into the 25 metre strip, levelled and crushed down using our mini-digger.
This week, we had a delivery of the recycled crushed asphalt material, just 4 tons to start off with. Then, ourselves with our neighbour, did another scraping using a wide CLS timber with pieces of plywood screwed to it to form the careful shape we want to finish off, guided by a taut string and smooth out the rectangular in front of the neighbour’s first gateway. The special shape is with the two parallel tracks to have a slight angle to them so any rainwater will be encouraged to flow into the centre channel and then flow down the Loke without spilling into anyone’s garden.

Then a grid of twelve by five modules was clipped together and positioned 500mm away from the gate posts. The small gap was filled in with additional line of these plastic 40mm high grid modules, but with their width trimmed down to fit. The whole area was then loaded up with the crushed asphalt and then raked all over, with plenty of thumping using our lighter-weighted electric compacter to vibrate the material to settle down into each little cells (each measuring just about 70mm square and seven of these cells on a side to form the overall 500mm grid modules).

We will go back in a few days time to put down more “fines” to top up any cells that has settled more than others. The next task is to form the two tracks coming down the Loke, connected to this initial finished area and this will take us to the second rectangular section in front of the 2nd gateway. We will have to order more recycled asphalt material, probably another 4 tons.