Would this work?

[Ravenlost]

We have some ever growing large potholes in our half mile long dirt/gravel driveway.

I have boxes and boxes of magazines that I refuse to dump in the landfill.

Last night I got the bright idea that we should fill the potholes with stacks of old magazines, then fill in around them with dirt/sand.

Hubby says it won't work.

What do you think?

[Jan Doling]

I used creek pebbles on top of landscape no-weed material. It worked.

Won't the magazines turn into compost and get slimy?

[farmergirl]

Ravenlost,
If you could somehow shred up the magazines (a simple home office paper shredder would be a slow go, but it would work) and then mixed them all together with something like quickcrete cement, it might just work. I don't think the magazines alone would do the trick, though

[onthespot]

in horse stalls, if you try to fill a pee hole with manure to make it go away, the pee hole just gets bigger and bigger because the manure holds moisture, which soaks and erodes the edges of the pee hole, and each time you dig it out, more dirt breaks loose and soon it will be three feet wide and a foot deep, instead of a foot wide and six inches deep. If you fill a stall hole with DG (decomposed granite, which is what we use around here) then pack it and crown the top enough to make the urine run off instead of pool, the low spot will disappear.

[Ravenlost]

Hmmm...so he's right and I'm wrong? Say it ain't so!!!

What we're using right now is cat litter...every time we change a litterbox it goes into a pothole. Unfortunately, since most of the cats prefer to go outside, it takes a LONG time to fill up a hole.

[rambler]

Cat litter really isn't going to help you either.

What you want for a good road is for it to be raised.

A clay-type layer or hard dirt. It needs to be crowned - slopped to the sides, middle of the road higher.

Gravel for drainage & stability. The bigger pebbles distribute the weight around.

Water should quickly flow through the gravel, hit the clay or hard layer, and weep off tot he side and into the road shoulders. Leaving the middle hard clay/dirt nice and firm.

What you have are frost boils (what we call them here in the tundra) where the hard layer is holding & accepting water. This makes it soft, and any traffic over the top makes it bigger, softer, & worse.

If you catch them small, you can pretty easily grade them out & get good gravel over the top again.

If allowed to get bigger, the structure of your road is damaged, and you need to dig them out & rebuild the layers of your road from the bottom up to make it 'good' again.

A couple loads of new gravel spread over your driveway will, for a price, make things seem good again for a few years, tho the underlying boil is still there, collecting water & making a soft spot that will reappear - someday.

Once you have a good stable road bed, grading it once or 2x a year to keep that proper crown on top of it will keep it in good shape for years & years of use.

Old paper or cat litter is absorbant, and breaks down into compost - neither of which is a good road surface at all.

--->Paul

[oldgaredneck]

We got a couple of truckloads of wood chips from the local utility company after the last tornado cleanup. Mixed with our sand they filled in the driveway washouts very handily....

[Minelson]

Shoot...I was hoping the cat liter idea would be a good one! I have a hard time disposing of mine and I have a lot!

[soulsurvivor]

Do you have access to a creek bed? My dad used to tractor scoop the creek to keep our long road surfaced with rock.

[fixer1958]

We have a 1/2 mile drive our selves and it can be a pain.
First you need to find out what causes the hole and fix that (divert the drainage).
It doesn't take that much water flow to dig a hole.

I dig the hole out more with square edges and fill it in.
When you drive over it with smooth scooped edges, car tires push the rock out and the hole is still there.
As another poster mentioned, you need to keep the crown in the road for drainage. I pull it up off the sides 2x a year. Tires push it off to the sides and make tracks.
Never grade when it's wet. It breaks the seal that has been created from the dust in the gravel. It may not look like a seal, but it's there.

Winter snow will kill a driveway faster than anything if there is no crown. It melts and just sits there because the ground is frozen 4" down and it has nowhere to go and thus a mudhole is in the making.

Till I got things figured out, there was a few times I had to take the kids to the school bus on the tractor, because at the time there was no 4x4.

Just my observations. May not work for others.

[Rocky Fields]

Hey.

I think when it is dry and windy you will have magazine pages blowing all over your property. Use the leftover oatmeal instead;-)

RF

[Ravenlost]

What we have is a poorly built driveway...part of it anyway. It is raised and sloped, but the builder we hired to do our house had his cousin build the driveway and the guy was an idiot. The so called gravel they used was mostly dirt. Plus, they put two culverts in the wrong place (even after being told they were doing so). That's why we have potholes. The part of the drive hubby did up at the house hasn't developed a hole yet. He ordered good gravel and will probably get another load to do the lower half of the driveway.

We use clay cat litter and it is working great in the hole we've filled. When the hole was almost full of cat litter hubby finished it off with sand and it is holding up real well even though we've had an extremely wet Spring.

We don't get frost boils or snow here in Mississippi very often.

Ummm...how would magazines blow all over the place if we topped them with gravel/dirt?

[MoonShine]

Well, my thoughts are that it wouldn't hurt to try it. You wouldn't be out much except for the time it took to pack them in there...or maybe, the time to clean it up if it made a mess later.
Seems like on one of the recent threads, someone mentioned filling in the holes with corn cobs. I remember thinking that I might try that. Earlier this spring, I shovelled rocks into a big hole and then packed it down with wet dirt. It has settled quite a bit since then and since it took hours to load and shovel all of those rocks, I wouldn't mind finding an alternative.

[Mare Owner]

Can you take the magazines to a recycle collection?

[Ravenlost]

If we had one I could Mare Owner. Out here we don't have ANY type of recycling.

[Wolf mom]

Ravenlost, I think your cat litter is a good idea, although over time it may powder out and sink. The same with magazines as the pulp disintegrates under the dirt.

The best I've found to do is packl with dirt & gravel a little higher than the surrounding ground whenever one starts. And keep refilling as it packs down. The worst is to let it go & enlarge.

Yes, the best is a properly made drive, but some just don't have them & have to make do with what we've got.

[Barnyard]

when we were using wood stove, we dumped ashes in potholes. we have coal stove now and use the ashes from that in them. hubby would wait till county graded roads, then take tractor out, scoop up "excess" as he called it, and just "borrow" some for the drive.

[Mare Owner]

Originally Posted by Ravenlost

If we had one I could Mare Owner. Out here we don't have ANY type of recycling.

That's a bummer.

[Ravenlost]

Hey...I have a big box of ashes. Was going to put it in the compost though.