Gravel Delivery Across New York, From Item 4 to Topsoil

A drive that heaved and rutted over the winter is the job that starts most gravel delivery orders here, and in New York the repair depends on where you are standing when you look at it. Frost reaches roughly 4 feet down across most of the state, with the local building department setting the exact footing depth, so a thin scatter of stone over ground that is still soft in April gets found out by the following spring. Upstate the ground freezes hard and holds a lake-effect snowpack for months. On Long Island the ocean keeps winters milder, but the sandy outwash soils still freeze and thaw every year.

Why a rutted Oswego County drive is not a bagged-stone job

Bagged stone is sold in fractions of a cubic foot. A cubic yard is 27 cubic feet, and a single-car drive measuring 10 ft by 60 ft, topped at 3 inches, works out like this:

• 10 x 60 = 600 sq ft
• 600 x 3 / 12 = 150 cu ft
• 150 / 27 = 5.6 cu yd

At the roughly 2,800 lb per cubic yard this site publishes for driveway gravel, about 1.40 tons per yard, that comes to 5.6 x 1.40, or close to 7.8 tons. Buying that in bags means handling every stone twice and finishing with a surface that varies pallet to pallet. Bulk material for the same drive is graded the same way from end to end, which matters more than it sounds once a plow blade starts running over it each winter.

Collecting it yourself against having it tipped where you mark

Collection is limited by what you tow with, and aggregate is dense. Crusher run and Item 4 come in around 3,000 lb per cubic yard on this site's own published figures, so even a modest base course is several trips with a trailer. A delivered load arrives by dump truck and goes down in one pile at the spot you mark. What the truck needs is a clear route in and firm, level ground to tip on. That is worth walking before you order on a narrow Catskill lane, a Tug Hill road in late thaw, or a Queens driveway with wires over it. Delivery is arranged at checkout by ZIP code, and the delivery page covers what to have ready.

Two dozen materials, grouped by the layer they belong to

Base and drive surfaces. Item 4 is the New York trade name for compacting subbase stone, a 1 inch minus graded mix that packs under drives, pads and patios. Crusher run does the same work at 3/4 inch minus. Driveway gravel and walkway gravel are the layers you actually walk and drive on.

Clean stone for water. 3/4 inch crushed stone and 3/8 inch crushed stone are where most trench and bedding work starts. Yards here often ask for a washed size by a number rather than by the inch, and those numbers are not used identically from one yard to the next, so check the size printed on the product page against whatever number you have been quoted. Alongside them sit #57, #67, drain rock, #4, #8, #89 and railroad ballast, all of them washed or open enough to let snowmelt move instead of sitting in a trench.

Bedding and sand. Stone dust is what a New York yard means by screenings, and it is the bed under flagstone and pavers. Mason sand and washed sand cover mortar work, joints and leveling.

Decorative and planting. River rock, large river rock, pea gravel and shredded mulch for beds, borders and dry creek beds; screened topsoil, garden soil and fill dirt for grade, lawns and raised beds.

Bank and shoreline. RipRap is the armor stone for stream banks, culvert outlets and lake frontage, the material NYSDOT and local yards grade as light, medium or heavy stone fill.

Settle the depth before you touch the calculator

Measure the area, settle the depth before anything else, then put both into the material calculators. Each one applies the published weight for the material you pick, so the same patio returns different tonnages for stone dust and for pea gravel. There is a box, ticked by default, that adds 5% for compaction and spillage (10% on dirt, crusher run, road base and paver base), and the result comes back in cubic yards, tons and cubic feet.

From there, open the product page, set the quantity, choose a delivery date and enter the ZIP. If a job needs a base course and a surface course, size them separately and order both at once. If you are caught between two materials for a particular bit of ground, the contact form takes the measurements and the ZIP in one message. The full catalogue is the way in when the material is still open, the ordering questions page covers what comes up next, and who is behind this storefront sets out what happens between checkout and the tip.