The end of my driveway has a lot of pebbles!
The problem is when our cars go over them they pick them up and spread them over the concrete.
I'm also worried about them being in the grass when I mow it. I've tried spray glue, but a 2L concentrate bottle barely covers it.
Should I get more pebble glue, or is there another way to make them stay in place?
by bingoisafish
7 Comments
Somebody used the wrong rocks for a driveway. You need gravel that isn’t rounded, so it locks together. Pea gravel will never work.
Are they round or jagged?
You can’t use round gravel for a driveway. There’s nothing you can do here.
If they’re a big more irregular you can hire a plate compactor and go over them a few times – see if it will compact.
If you want to actually do this right you would have them removed. Put down a geohex product to stabilize them. And then put in “sharps”, aka gravel of the correct size and made of irregular angles that can be compacted to “lock” into each other.
I don’t know how this would be on a driveway, but I’ve seen some walking paths work with round gravel when polymeric sand is raked in. Cements it together and creates kind of spongy rubber asphalt. Just a thought
Stop wasting money on the pebble glue because it is a losing battle against car tires. You have what looks like pea gravel there which is essentially a pit of ball bearings that will never lock together no matter how much you tamp or glue it. This is a super common headache I help people fix because installers love how cheap pea gravel is but leave you with the maintenance nightmare.
The best long-term fix is to swap that round rock for an angular crushed stone like a 3/8 inch chip or washed crushed gravel. Angular stones have jagged edges that lock together under compression so they stay put when you drive over them instead of rolling away. If you are totally married to the look of the round pebbles you would need to scrape it back and install a permeable paver grid system underneath to trap the stones in honeycomb cells so they cant migrate.
For the grass issue you absolutely need a rigid edging material between the gravel and the turf. Steel edging or a concrete mow strip is the only way to keep those rocks out of your lawnmower blades. Without a physical barrier slightly higher than the grade of the gravel you are eventually going to launch a rock through a window or your shin.
Replace with a 4 to 5 band of 5/8 minus or 1/4 gravel and compact
If you plan on driving on it regularly you might be able to get away with 6 inches deep but the standard is 12 inches compacted and this is compacted in depths of 3 inches at a time
The binding agents that are readily available are typically not suitable for car weight
Good luck
Are they part of the driveway? If not create a border surrounding the pebbles.
Rake up the pea gravel, sell on FBMP.
Replace with same amount of chips & dust.