June 27, 2022
#448
Gentle reader,
It has been a month and a half since I have written for you. Mainly because we are transitioning from acquiring things to getting rid of them so that our adult children will not have so much to deal with when we are gone.
While we both still collect, we are much more cognizant of finding room for new things by removing older ones.
That being said, this article has nothing to do with collecting, unless one counts rocks and stones.
Let me start with photos of our backyard after a heavy rain with the original iteration of the dry creek.
As you can see, the dry creek was quite a bit narrower than the new version seen in the panorama photo above.
It has two trees in the middle of it, the one above has since died, so we cut it down and removed the stump. There is vegetation growing in the creek as well. This was not anticipated by us. Rain washed soil and silt down the hill into the creek as well as pollen, leaves and other tree debris settled between the rocks and stones. Plus, there was nothing to keep the water from leaving the bed of the creek.
Note, also, how the water flows towards the fences and makes a right turn, following the contours of the land.
It exits the backyard to the left of the tall grass and flows down the driveway to the gutter.
The pond we had installed was surrounded and fed by a huge number of stones we had purchased as well as all of the large ones which were found for us by our sons.
When we removed the pond and filled the hole back up, we had a LOT of rocks/stones piled up which gave me the initial idea to make a dry creek. The metal structure was also removed and the metal recycled.
While we did put weed blocking fabric down before we put the thousands of rocks and stones down, as previously stated, Nature did it's thing, determined to fill the gaps between the rocks so that plants could grow.
Above is another panorama photo, taken from a different angle, showing most of the creek and the garden Nancy decided to put in the middle of the yard.
Another fisheye lens photograph of the new fabric in place. I was not going to let nature try and cover it up this time!
A couple years ago, I painstakingly removed, by hand, EVERY ONE of the thousands of river rocks and stones, placing them all on the deckette. Vowing to redo the creek and make it better. We did not keep track of how many 50 pound bags of river rocks we bought to make the creek. But it was a lot of them.
Finally, I was determined that 2022 was going to be the year to do just that. Armed with 100 feet of quality and wider weed block fabric, I removed the old fabric and all the debris that had settled on it. I first had to remove all of the large granite and quartz rocks which bordered the creek. I laid out the new fabric, starting with the 48" wide roll at the bottom end of the creek. I employed more than 100 fabric "staples" designed to hold in place this type of fabric.These three photos, taken with an 18mm lens from the deck, are the ones which were merged to make the panorama photo at the beginning of the article.
I bought twenty 50 pound bags of Sacrete quick setting concrete mix and had them delivered. That's 1000 pounds. We knew it was not going to be enough, but had to start somewhere.
This photo shows how far thirteen bags and many hundreds of stones covered. This time, I put the concrete mix between all the border rocks to discourage inflow of silt from the hill and keep the water in the creek. Also, larger river rocks were cemented in front of the large rocks to further deter the water. Note how many stones remained on the deckette after we finished. We were afraid we might run out since the creek is so much wider than before.
We took both our cars to Lowes and bought twelve more fifty pound bags of concrete mix, another six hundred pounds total. It took nine bags to make it to the neighbor's fence. For a total of 1,350 pounds of concrete, PLUS the weight of the countless rocks and stones. This creek is not going anywhere!
To my surprise, we had some large rocks left over, so the grouping seen here, covers the bare earth where the willow stump had been.
Try and wrap your mind around this. EVERY SINGLE ROCK AND STONE you see in these photos was HAND SET into the concrete mix, one-by-one! Whew!
Unlike the previous version, there is only ONE layer of river rocks. Each pressed into the concrete mix which was around an inch and a half to two inches deep.
I deliberately left this area open because I need a path to get the lawnmower from the lower portion of the lawn to the "upper forty" as I call it.
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. It is is prime example of how putting off things one knows are going to be a lot of work can complicate that work with things that would not have been present had the work be done sooner rather than later.
Scott & Nancy Robb
June 27, 2022
#448
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