We will rock you

All of the flower/shrub beds outside of our house are covered in black plastic with rocks on top. When we bought the house, J and I didn't love the rocks, but they promised to be a low maintenance form of weed control, so we called it good enough.

Rocks are not as low maintenance as we'd hoped. They collect leaves and twigs. We've tried rakes and leaf blowers but there is no efficient way to keep the rocks from looking junky. And we were constantly picking rocks out the grass. Plus the grass and chives grow through rocks regardless.

J and I hatched a plan to spiff up the shrub beds, and mulch is the answer. With this, we'd be at least maintaining a bedding material that we like to look at. We also learned that mulch is not advisable next to our house, due to termite issues. And since we wanted to put in beds for shrubs on the southeast and southwest sides of the house (underneath the bedroom windows), we decided to save to rock for those areas. J was jazzed to start this project, and we decided we'd start on the area closest to the patio first.

Please note that the record shows that J's comment prior to the de-rocking project was "Oh, it'll only take a couple or hours, and it'll be fun!"

Ha. Well, fun is relative term. And it took the better part of Sunday. But we have completed this much.



Hmm. This project definitely has a high tedious and sweaty work to landscaping impact ratio.



Here's where we stopped. I buried the cable/internet/phone line (apparently Medicom does not bore through rocks) and put in the stepstones, with the hope that this will remind me not to dig there.



But we have a long way to go. The rocks go to the fenceline.

One last photo.


This is where one of the new flower/shrub beds will be. I put in a snowball viburnum, which is supposed to grow 10 ft x 10 ft and cover the brick between the two windows. We plan to put in an edge border with some artistic swoop to accent the viburnum.

Oh, and it was 80 oF and sunny here this weekend.