Never bought gravel before? If you’re overwhelmed, you’re not alone. We covered some of the basics about buying gravel so that you can be more confident in selecting and ordering gravel for your project.

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With no other place to go, a mother pulls her van into a newly graveled lot. It doesn’t look like much, but it’s a godsend. It’s lit with a streetlight, and there’s running water, portable bathrooms, and outlets where she can charge her phone.

The entire lot is fenced, and the gate locks at night. Her kids can play in the field nearby. In the morning, there will be a hot meal ready at the church next door, and her whole family will be given bagged lunches filled with sandwiches, fruit, chips, drinks, and treats.

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Daniel Burnstein of Brooklyn, New York had a unique dilemma: his client wanted to be able to use the backyard with a wheelchair. Concrete work and pavers can be expensive, and Daniel liked the rustic charm of gravel.

His question: Can gravel surfaces be wheelchair accessible? The answer is yes—if they meet certain standards.

Washington Rock, with the help of landscape architect Clayton Beaudoin, researched the topic and came up with guidelines for making gravel surfaces wheelchair accessible.

Our goal is to make these guidelines as easy as possible to follow, so we created a simple guide below. Then we included additional resources, such as a Glossary of Terms and Research Notes.

Check out the companion piece to this article, “Designing for Diana: How We Made Gravel Wheelchair-Accessible in Brooklyn,” to read about how we used our guidelines to help Daniel create a gravel-accessible backyard. The project is summarized in the video below.

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Washington Rock Quarries regularly blogs about causes and businesses that use our rock, sand, or soil products. In 2021, we published this story about Old Goat Farm, owned and operated by Gary Waller and Greg Graves. Greg passed away in late 2022, and Greg recently sold Old Goat Farm and began a new adventure in Eatonville, WA. We kept the Old Goat Farm story in the original format and hope you can continue to find inspiration in it.

Tucked away in the woods of Graham is a sprawling garden from the pages of a storybook. Swaths of flowers border a lawn that flows in different directions. Each garden bed is flush with hundreds of plants: fluffy peonies here, yellow clusters of ranunculus there, colonies of hosta winding like a forest stream. The colors and forms are endless.

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