Pages

Friday, December 29, 2017

The Rocks

As I mentioned before, one of the projects I tackled this summer was moving The Rocks off of The Wall.

This wall:

The horrible, falling-over wall that has been a source of consternation since we moved here. In July, we decided to move forward with replacing the wall and got the work scheduled for late August. Knowing that the rocks would be in the way of the workers, I decided I wanted them off the wall before work began.

It was not fun work. You can't just throw rocks away, especially not in the quantity that we had.


We tried to give them away, and were eventually able to get rid of some that way, but in the end, more of them stayed in our yard than left it.

One of the ways I used them was along the fence which runs down the east side of the back yard. Our neighbors have river rock on their side of the fence already, and the area is prone to eroding and hard to mow. As with most things this summer, however, I had to tackle another project before I could start this one.


Where the spade sits in the above photo, the prior owners had stacked a bunch of "logs". As you can see, they were generally chunks of a large tree trunk. We've got pieces of this tree all around the yard, but this area was a big pile. I moved them away from the fence, loaded the ones I could lift into the truck, and hauled them away. Then I started laying rocks along the fence.

Obviously, I couldn't lift most of the stumps
One day, a neighbor came by to ask if I'd like some hostas that she had to move out of her garden. Of course, I'll take free plants.


I continued the rocks and hostas on the other side of the fence in the top of the above picture.


This corner is the far back end of the new area covered in my prior two posts.

Some of the stumps found new life as potential backyard seating (or just more things to mow around).


Moving rocks by the bucket and wheelbarrow load in July and August is not something I'd recommend, but it was a good workout, and extremely satisfying.


Did I mention the entire area has landscape cloth underneath?



I did run out of time and energy before the wall work began, but I made great progress. I also never got back to it this fall, so come spring, I'll be out moving rocks again. Then I'll have another large open area that needs to get covered in plants so the weeds don't take over. Wow, I've got my work cut out for me.

1 comment:

  1. Progress is always good - when it comes to tough jobs, we should always focus on what we did do instead of what is left to be done.

    We also have a pile of rocks, but it's one that we made over the past few years - our area is incredibly rocky and you can't dig more than a couple of inches without hitting something so we've been piling them up. I'm hoping to use quite a lot of them to edge some beds this coming year.

    ReplyDelete