Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘retaining wall’

Flagstone and Other Rocks

Posted in gardening, tagged , , , on June 19, 2025| 1 Comment »

This is not about herbs. I know I promised to write about herbs, but in typical ADHD style, I got sidetracked. Again. Subconsciously I think I am avoiding writing about herbs and my “new” adventure in growing and using them. I mean, what do I honestly know about herbs except how to use them in cooking?

This post is about rocks. Rocks, my back, and being 68 years old doing things as if I was still my younger self. Because, Baby, I am going to sleep well tonight.

I’ll blame my husband on the digression: it all started when we went out to lunch for a belated anniversary date on the 14th. We had been tossing around ideas for a walkway made of flagstone, but how far would we have to travel to find the rock now that the local rock and gravel place is shuttered? We were traveling south on I-205 with a destination just off Stafford Road and I thought to myself that there used to be a rock place there… Great minds think alike (so they say) because Don said, “Didn’t there used to be a rock place right there…?”

Well, it is still there. And we stopped there after lunch to browse. GEM Rock and Landscaping. Quaint place with little wood buildings, lots of chickens, more pigeons, and plenty of rocks for landscaping. One can purchase sourdough bread when it is available or a dozen eggs, all on the honor system. The woman working when we arrived also grows and sells heirloom vegetable plants (we picked up one tomato and two dill plants). The whole vibe is laid back hippie which is quite unexpected from a place selling landscape rocks.

We returned on Thursday in a friend’s big ¾ ton pickup and loaded up 219# of “Pennsylvania blue” flagstone at $0.44 per pound. The men did most of the heavy lifting on Thursday, but the actual lay out and creating was left up to me. And today, I set out to put the puzzle pieces together.

We’re short about 5-6 rocks. And I want some smaller pieces to put around a water feature I am building, so – another 5 or six smaller rocks. We can just use my car to make that load.

Since that was a dead-end and I was all set to work with rocks today, I decided to just finish the retaining wall. The portion left is outside of the vegetable garden, in full shade, and in the part of the yard we do the least with. We still have tree stumps and branches stacked there from the big ice storm of 2021. The pallet of rocks that have been sitting in our driveway for the retaining wall have been there almost as long.

75 rocks. I already had ten in the yard, and I made two trips with the wagon before taking a break and having lunch. I could only manage one more trip before I simply could not pull that damn wagon another forty feet with a load of rocks in it, so I asked my husband to please make the last trip for me. I did all the other work, just not that one last wagon pull.

And then I fell into my Adirondak chair and just sat. The wall is done. I have about 45 rocks left over. Don brought those into the yard, too, and I helped a little bit with that just to get the pallet off our driveway. It’s only been there for three years.

My only other gardening act today was to put up one more homemade birdbath: a tin bowl glued to a funky stand someone else welded together (I got it for free at a yard sale last year).

Read Full Post »

Jaci’s Garden

Posted in gardening, tagged , , , , , , on January 1, 2025| 1 Comment »

I have decided to turn this blog into a Gardening blog. I find myself drawn outdoor more often now that I am retired, and I am even beginning to delve into the murky waters of maintaining houseplants without killing them. I have a lot of gardening how to and how not to ideas, along with my own journey into landscaping the property we currently live on (and, hopefully, any property we move onto in the future, assuming we don’t end up in some Senior Living facility where I will be forced to garden houseplants).

I did get quite a bit done in the garden in 2024. The biggest item on my to-do list was to build a retaining wall inside the vegetable garden area. I bought a pallet of concrete stones a couple years ago (like, three or four years ago). The pallet has been sitting in our driveway taking up valuable parking space for that amount of time. I had a vision of what I wanted to do but the excuses for not doing it were myriad.

I’m not going to kid you: I am 68 years old and things are a little harder to do now.

But I sucked it up last summer and started hauling rocks from the driveway into the veggie garden area. The idea is not only to stop the neighbor’s gravel from eroding into our yard, but to create a long planting bed along the edge of the fence.

It’s almost complete: I have enough rocks left over to put one more layer around the fence, enough corrugated tin to use as a weed/gravel barrier, and then we need to put good potting soil into the space created. It’s not as straight as it could be, but I did it entirely myself, from the weed removal to the rock hauling (well, I coerced a certain someone to help a little with the rock hauling, but most of it was my back ache). My husband will be elected to cut the tin into smaller pieces but I will tell him that when the weather improves and I finish the planting beds.

Now, we just have to agree what plants are going to be planted in that border bed. I want a large rhubarb somewhere in there. My husband has already planted an espalier pear tree and an artichoke that hasn’t produced fruit, but also hasn’t died. We haven’t had a killing frost yet this winter so it may still die. Then, again, maybe it won’t and 2025 will be the year that we get at least one artichoke from it.

My favorite project of 2024 was a bird bath that I made out of a discarded pedestal to a sink we pulled out of our bathroom during the remodel. I placed it in the center of the lawn south of our new deck and dug out a flower bed around it. I placed native round rocks all around that and planted some annuals (I rarely garden with annuals, but it was late in the season, and they were all I could find at the local nursery). I will replace them with something perennial in 2025.

I have multiple bird baths of different depths and sizes: this is the one the crows love. The only expense was the bowl I used for the basin: $4.99 at a thrift store. E6000 is the glue I used to attach it to the pedestal.

Read Full Post »