Walkway Gravel in Maryland: 3/8 Inch Stone for Paths People Walk

The order that comes through most often is the back-door route: the line from the house to the shed, the garden gate or the trash cans that has been worn to bare ground and turns to mud after every storm. On Piedmont silt loam that mud stays for days, and on flat Eastern Shore ground with a high water table it can outlast the rain by a week. A graded 3/8 inch crushed stone gives that route a firm, draining surface without the trouble and expense of paving it.

Choose it for the route to the shed, skip it for the pole barn pad

Order Walkway Gravel when:

• The traffic is on foot. Garden paths, side walks, the connection between a patio and a seating area.
• The route needs to drain rather than shed. Water moves down through the stone instead of standing on it.
• The finish should read as landscape rather than hard paving, curving through beds rather than cutting straight lines.
• The joints around flagstone or concrete steppers need filling with something that steadies the units and keeps mud and weeds out of the gaps.

Skip it when:

• Example, a pole barn or equipment pad. A 3/8 inch stone has no business carrying machinery, and the pad wants CR-6 or Crusher Run built in lifts and rolled.
• Example, a single-car gravel driveway. Tires displace a fine stone and throw it into the lawn, and a drive wants a compacted base with Driveway Gravel as the surface course.
• The route crosses a slope steep enough that a loose surface will travel. Steps or a bound surface are the better answer there.

Flagstone joints, the garden route and the walk to the gate

• Example, a flagstone walkway. The flags carry the foot and the gravel fills between them, which stops the stones rocking and keeps the gaps from turning into weed beds. Keep the fill level with the top of the flags rather than proud of them.
• A curving path through planting beds is where this material sits most naturally, since it takes a curve without a cutting or a form and can be adjusted later without demolition.
• A front or side walk replacing broken concrete goes down faster than a paved replacement, and on Critical Area lots within 1,000 feet of tidal water, where surface coverage is limited, it is worth checking how a new path counts before it goes in.
• A border strip between a patio and a planted bed gives runoff somewhere to land and keeps a clean line between the two.

Surface course over a compacted layer, never the base itself

This is where paths fail in Maryland, and it is worth being blunt about.

• On clay ground, 3/8 inch stone spread straight on soil works itself into the mud over one wet winter and vanishes. The route ends up muddier than it was.
• The path wants a compacted layer underneath, shaped and rolled, with the finer stone as the wearing course over it. That is the same sequence a drive uses at a smaller scale.
• Landscape fabric between the base and the soil is doing two jobs: holding weeds down and stopping the subsoil pumping up into the stone. On silty Piedmont ground the second one matters more.
• Set an edge on both sides. Timber, steel edging or a spade-cut trench shoulder all work, and without one the path spreads and thins until it is twice the width and half the depth you built.
• Give the surface a slight crown or a fall to one side. Frost heave finds the low spot first, and a path holding water through a 30 inch frost line is the one that goes uneven.

Measuring a 90-foot path and a run of flagstone joints

Square feet times depth in feet, divided by 27, gives cubic yards. Depth in inches divides by 12 first.

• Example, a garden path 90 feet long by 3 feet wide, surface course at 2 inches: 90 x 3 = 270 square feet. 2 inches is 0.167 feet, so 270 x 0.167 = 45 cubic feet, divided by 27 = 1.7 cubic yards. The compacted base beneath is a separate order in a separate material.
• Example, the same path with a 3 inch surface instead of 2: 270 x 0.25 = 67.5 cubic feet, divided by 27 = 2.5 cubic yards. Deeper is not better on a path, since a loose surface over 3 inches walks like dry sand.
• Example, filling the joints on a flagstone walkway 40 feet by 4 feet where the gaps make up about 15 per cent of the area: 160 square feet x 0.15 = 24 square feet of joint. At 2 inches that is 24 x 0.167 = 4 cubic feet, divided by 27 = 0.15 cubic yards. Small, but worth ordering alongside something else rather than on its own.

At this site's published weight for driveway and walkway gravel, about 1.40 tons per cubic yard and approximate, that is roughly 2.4 tons for the 2 inch path, about 3.5 tons for the same path at 3 inches and about 0.2 tons for the flagstone joints.

Take those cubic yards to the gravel calculator for tonnage, because the conversion uses the density figure the tool holds for this material.

Getting the load down close to the path

Delivery is arranged at checkout from your ZIP code, and the truck needs clear access to somewhere it can tip and pull away from. On a suburban lot that is usually the driveway, so think about the wheelbarrow route to the back of the house before the day, and measure the gate. A tarp under the pile keeps the driveway clean and makes the last shovelfuls easier to lift.

Measure the route, decide on a depth, then choose a tonnage and a delivery date on this page. If the path is going in over soft ground and you want the base and the surface ordered together, send the length and width through contact and the two quantities can be worked out in one go.