Tuesday, October 06, 2009

I Must Have Rocks in My Head!

We started on the rock garden redo this afternoon. It's a lot of work, it's going to take us several days and it is hard, dirty work. But once it's done, it will be so nice. The rock garden will be larger and we're going to rearrange some of Otter's concrete animals a bit. As well as move the fountain-turned-planter back a few inches and see what else I come up with.

Basically, today's activities included moving all the aforementioned concrete animals out, all the fossils, limestone, geodes, "grammy rocks", statues, the TEXAS shape, the signs and any rocks that we thought were interesting and wanted to make sure they got back on top instead of buried in all the other rocks. Bill's wheelbarrow is now full of rocks and there are still a bunch more to go. Bill's got some large heavy-gauge nylon type plastic bags that we originally bought the rocks in, and as soon as he finds them :) we'll start putting rocks in them as well. Then, after all the rocks have been removed, we're going to pull all the plastic up, get the hoes and get busy re-leveling the dirt. Oh yeah, the fountain-turned-planter will still need to be moved out before we can level, but it's the last thing we'll move out because it weighs a TON. Or at least it feels like it, when we've had to move it. Then, after all that, we'll move the sandstone pieces that are my edge out of the way.

Then, after all that fun stuff, I am going to use the ground liner from the pool in place of the thinner plastic I used when we first put the rock garden in. It's fairly thick and should last for several years. This is a spot where I want to keep weeds & grass out of forever, so I'm not going to use anything such as newspaper which would biodegrade. The next step will be to do everything in reverse to put it all back in place. Although some of the places will be changed, Otter has a lot of concrete animals and some of them will be put on the other side of the trellis so that they'll be at the base of the trellis. But I have to level some of the dirt underneath the trellis, thanks to a certain small & fat beagle who shall remain nameless. Otter's concrete animals used to be in assorted places, there were some in the rock garden and then she had some of them placed in the flower bed that used to be along the back of the house. When we took that flower bed down, they moved to the rock garden.

I'll be glad when it's done. It will look very nice. Until then, I think I'll go take a motrin or two and hopefully my arms & shoulders won't be too sore to use tomorrow. And then I'll think about Mom, and how she moved all her rocks from one side of town to the other when we all moved. And she had way more rocks to deal with than I do, along with all sorts of other interesting objects.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes Mom and you and I moved all the rocks. Dad was sick and couldn't help. I need to get out and redo all my flower beds and the rocks. I have to put them in the front bed because Lucky the lab will eat the rocks. She eats the ones that she can get to in the backyard. I have one raised flower bed in the back yard that I am going to de grass and weed and them plant wildflower seeds and then put a large piece of wire around it and tie it down to the fence and to the landscape timbers on the front and sides. Maybe if I spray the wire with dog stuff she may stay out of it. I will also take her over to the wire fence and show her a wadded up newspaper. Just showing it to her has helped in the past. Froggy