kbischoff - You made me smile. : ) Anyone that's willing to cook and clean in exchange for plants must be a hard worker and a true garden lover. If you email me your address, I'll send you a box of plants to help you get started in exchange for a coneflower plant so I'll have something from your garden too.

I would probably go with rubber mulch or pebbles like at some playground where the kids play. You don't need it to break down to feed the surrounding area as much as you need it to withstand the traffic and possibly reduce the required maintenance from you, year after year.

I agree with Kat about the size of the deer ticks. When my son was in the scouts we went camping for a night in a state park here in New Jersey. Within the first hour we saw ticks all over the place. That night I took him into the bathroom before we went to sleep and removed about 7 good sized ticks. I thought we were set. The next day when we got home I asked my wife to check my son for ticks and within 1 minute she said that he was clean. Well... I could not believe that anyone could check the whole body and hair that quickly so I looked. I saw these little specks on him that I thought were dirt, but when I tried to brush them away they did not move. They were smaller than the finest ground pepper I ever saw. I took a magnifing glass and took a look and sure enough they were ticks! We both had about 15 of them. Sure enough I panicked and looked up all the lyme forums I could find. Scary stuff. We went to a specialist and was told that there is a thought that if one took a high dose of a certain antibotic within 72 hours of getting bit the chances of getting lyme are greatly reduced. Of course it depends on who you ask, but we took the antibotics. So don't be fooled by the dog ticks and other stuff that you see. These guys are almost microscopic!

Nate, it sounds like the following is too late, since your work has already begun, but for what it's worth: We had 4 new roofs (entire house) and everything that that entailed (remove old roofs, put on new + gutters & downspouts) and new stucco siding on one side of the house's addition (hence, remove all old stucco, too). Contractor also created a new profile for the eave over that side of the house; also made and installed a copper overhang for the window on that side. Not all of this was done at the same time; still, a lot of construction materials and debris. Used the same contractor and his small crew for everything. The crew was able to do the roofing job by accessing all the roofs from the patio; the main issue was roof debris that ended up on the ground. They were exceedingly careful and neat but even now, I do find the occasional nail and bits of roofing material. For the stucco work, however, they needed to erect and safely access scaffolding. I asked the contractor to try to protect a daylily bed directly under the side of the house needing that work. For various reasons, I couldn't dig up the plants in it, even though it contained some daylilies I value a lot (eg LAST SNOWFLAKE, NEON FLAMINGO, COWBOY SCARF, MABOU, Jack Carpenter patterns, and more), so he set up the scaffolding on a large piece of plywood that was placed on cinder blocks on either end of the bed (and with two blocks supporting the mid part of the wood). The crew had to access the scaffolding of course, so one end of the bed got badly trampled & the soil very compacted. Even so, given what had to be done to the house, and the time they spent doing it, the daylilies sailed through everything in near perfect condition. There was a lot of bent and torn foliage, but it was late autumn anyway so that didn't matter. Plus, it was the crowns I'd been concerned about. We plan to use the same guys to paint the house's exterior next spring. Since I don't know exactly which month that will be, I expect to have to dig up the entire bed. Even so, I'll ask the contractor to once again place scaffolding on plywood on cinder blocks. The idea will be to protect the soil from compaction so that I can use that bed again as soon as the work is done.