Weekend Warrior

Katy drank too much coffee this morning while watching HGTV and decided we needed to do the rock garden. Today, on a Sunday, the day that was meant for relaxation before the week begins. I seem to remember something in the Bible about Sunday being the Sabbath and how you aren't supposed to work.

Schomer Schabbis!

Anyway, the task whether or not I chose to accept it, was to turn our weed garden into a rock garden. Here's what we started with:

So, to do it right you have to dig out dirt. A lot of it. The recommendations were for 10 to 12 inches but we thought 6-8 should do it.

After digging out, literally, a ton of dirt, it was time to go to Home Depot and stock up on the sand to mix with the dirt, weed stop tarp, decorative gravel, and stones for the walkway across the rock garden. In all we loaded 30 50-lb bags of gravel, 10 50-lb bags of sand, 8 decorative stones, and 5 15-lb bags of decorative lava onto a single Home Depot cart. A guy in a forklift saw me and asked if I was gonna push that big cart myself. I said "Oh yeah!"

When we loaded it all into the CRV we thought twice about our decision not to get Katy's parent's Explorer to split the load. Here's a pic after the slow ride home, with the CRV loaded up with the approximately 2100 lbs of stuff.After unloading all this stuff, I was feeling strong! Katy had gone back to HD to grab some landscaping staples, so I decided to have a beer while I waited for the next stage. Brooklyn Brown never tasted so good!

Now it was time to put down the underlayment with some landscaping staples. Here's Katy having too much fun with this task, in my humble opinion:


So, just pouring and levelling the base rock and red lava rock, then adding the stepping stones for a shortcut to the deck and voila! Rock garden complete. I have to admit, it does look a lot better this way. Katy will be adding shrubs when she has time to find ones that she wants to fit in with the garden. HD didn't have the greatest selection of small shrubberies. Maybe we should start the Knights of Nii on our block and force people to bring us shrubberies.


Don't forget that after this was done, we still had a least 1000 lbs of dirt left over, which we had to shovel into buckets and carry to the back of the yard for redistribution.

After all this, I am tired. HGTV will be banned in our house on weekends for a while. Signing off and going to bed at 8:00p.m.,

J