This little bed sits across our driveway from the house. Last year, we cleared a mess of palms and wood borders out and planted eight Nandinas. We did a lot of work on our front yard with stone and landscape lighting, etc., but we never finished up this isolated little bed. When Nel suggested that we finish this off today I was on board. Sounds like fun - A few rocks, a little mulch, an hour later we hit the pool. No problem!
We strategically waited until about 1:00pm to make sure we had achieved the 98 degree high for the day and then headed to Home Depot where we picked up seven 60 pound bags of mulch. Next it was off to the rock yard for some stone. Stone is pretty cheap and easy to buy - IF you're getting enough of it to warrant having it delivered. If you just need a small amount (as we did) you get to pick each piece yourself, load it on a cart, weigh it, load it into your vehicle, then unload it from your vehicle when you get home. We forgot to bring gloves, but the stone we chose was fairly smooth so it wasn't too big of a deal. We settled on a type of rock - tumbled marble - and hand selected 305 pounds of it. After weighing it and paying the man, we loaded up and headed home.
The next step was to clear out the weeds and old mulch, as well as a few inches of old dirt, from the top of the bed. This wouldn't be too big of a deal except that we don't have a wheel barrow. I usually borrow my brothers, but I didn't want to take the 10 minutes to drive over to his house and pick it up so I just moved each shovel full by hand. After getting the bed cleaned out and shallowed, we proceeded to set the first row of stone. You have to really get the first row level if you're going to stack, especially with flatter stone like we selected. When the ground is soft this is a pretty easy task. Unfortunately, when you're in the middle of a 100-year drought and you forgot to water a particular bed the night before it becomes a little tougher. With some effort we managed to get the first row nicely arranged by digging or adding dirt as we went. We were doing pretty well until we realized we were going to be short on rocks!
Back in the Tahoe - back to the rock yard (with gloves this time). We selected and loaded 155 pounds of tumbled marble this time, and added a 104 pound Fireflame boulder to add to the front yard for good measure. When we got home we finished up the stone border and then mulched the bed.
(When I look at this picture, it still looks like it should have taken about 20 minutes to do this)
After finishing up the bed and placing the boulder in one of the front beds, we kicked off our shoes and dove into the pool. It was about 5:00pm.
I started thinking about the total weight we moved today. We had seven 60 pound bags of mulch. We had to load them on a cart at HD - load them into the truck at HD - unload them when we got home - and dump them when we were ready. That means we lifted 1680 pounds of mulch. With the stone it's even worse. With a total of 564 pounds of stone (including the boulder) we lifted at least 2256 pounds of rock. Not a shock that I managed to tweak something in my shoulder.
Side note - When I moved the 104 pound rock to the front of the house, It made me think about those "World's Strongest Man" competitions. I was carrying it like they do in the event they call "Africa Stone". I'm not a small guy, and I was struggling with my 104 pounder - the one's those guys carry weighs 385!! Amazing.
Anyway - as usual the estimate for a home project was about 1/5th the time and effort of what it actually ended up being. You'd think I'd learn. :-)
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