Grace- That's a Lot o' Rocks

My family is doing some season landscaping projects to spiffy up our property a bit. We own about 3 acres in a country subdivision, and we are on the nicer side of the neighborhood. To be honest, we are not the nicest house, we have a lot of stuff and a lot of outdoor stuff, and considering that all of our neighbor's are older people that have immaculate lawns and gardening, you can imagine how we stick out.

My daddy and mama have come up with a plan for how to make our place look nicer using materials that we already have. One of the plans involves a rock bed in front of our house. This particular rock bed has been a pain in the backside for quite sometime. The man who built our house didn't put down any landscaping fabric, so underneath the rocks is a layer of dirt. In this dirt weeds find a foothold and then grow into nasty and unattractive monsters that make our house look neglected.

Their plan involves removing the rocks bit by bit and putting plastic underneath them, thus eliminating the dirt factor. After that we will clear a space to put flower boxes, and then fill in the open places with the rocks.

One problem with all of this, the rocks themselves are mingled and mangled in with the dirt. Solution, just wash them! Ho, not that easy.

This morning my daddy tried just spraying them off on the walkway, but that didn't work. It sent a lot of rocks into the yard and onto the lawn mower path(dangerous idea) and everywhere else. Plus the dirt was just kind of piling up at the bottom and becoming dried mud that was plastered to the cement.

Remembering some old wisdom and experiences from his grandfather, my daddy made a wooden frame with netting stretched taut across the top and nailed firmly down on the side. BEAUTIFUL! Now all you have to do is take a few shovel fulls of rocks, spray them off, let the dirt run down through the netting, and then toss them back into the bed. Sounds easy, and as far as brain involvement goes, it is. But laborwise?

Me and my middle sister were out there for almost an hour shoveling, scraping, spraying, shifting, and dumping (this was the second time this happened, the first time it was when we actually had to shovel the rocks out of the bed and onto the pathway) . If you are wondering where my three strong and manly brothers were, they had retreated inside behind walls when they saw that we were ready to begin work. Though later my middle brother came out to help, but that was all.

After over an hour of that, my back ached, and I was STARVING! In we came for lunch and a change of clothing. I was covered in rock bits, mud, and water. Nothing could have felt better than stripping off my wet socks and jeans, and then slipping into some clean shorts and a shirt. Ah, sit down on the couch with a book and a back pillow, sigh... that's a lot o' rocks.