There’s No Figuring Them Out

My latest landscaping project involves a patch of our yard that we haven’t known what to do with for awhile. It’s a small area on the north side of the house, so it doesn’t get much Sun. Thus, not much grass grows there. But weeds grow there just fine. It also gets beat up quite a bit as all our cord wood is stacked in that area as well. For the most part, in the Summer it’s a weedy mess and the rest of the year it’s a muddy mess.

So I finally decided to act to improve it. Yesterday, I laid down about 600 square feet of weed cloth, after weed whacking the snot out of the entire area. I also cleaned it all up from the shards of wood and various other things that had collected there over time. I spent the afternoon getting the area prepped and then most of this morning putting a rock wall edging in place.

All of that was in preparation for today when, this afternoon, 4 tons of large river rock was dropped in our driveway. The rocks are all smooth and round and vary in size from large golf balls to squished baseballs. I had originally hoped the driver would be able to drop the stone over the edge of our driveway onto the destination patch of yard. That way the remainder of the project would be spreading stone instead of hauling stone.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out that way and now I’m hauling stone.

Surprisingly, the boy and the lass decided to pitch in and help. So we all worked together scooping stones into buckets. I scooped stone into a two-and-a-half gallon bucket; the boy scooped stone into a large beach bucket and the lass scooped stone into a small beach bucket. Each bucket appropriately sized for it’s user. I used a square shovel to fill the bucket, the boy used a smaller spade shovel, and the lass used a plastic beach shovel.

I kid you not.

The shovels didn’t last long for the kids though. After it started getting difficult, they decided the best thing was to sit on top of the pile of stone and fill their respective buckets by hand. This arrangement also afforded them with plenty of opportunity for messing with each other. One would make a cave, and then the other would sabotage the work by causing a collapse. Every now and again, a bucket would get filled and they would dutifully go and dump it in the yard.

They worked like that alongside me for the better part of 2 hours. It was fine by me because I was so exhausted after a bit of hauling that I could care less if they started throwing rocks at one another. As long as the rocks eventually ended up where they were supposed to, it was fine by me; and that many fewer I had to deal with.

They both quit before I did, washing themselves off with the hose before going to cool off in the pool for a bit. I just found it remarkable because we have a hard enough time getting them to clean up their dishes after a meal. Yet here they voluntarily were hauling stone.

The mind boggles.