Rock the Garden

Early in the summer, we did a lot of sprucing up in our front yard (with our landscaping, container garden, and front garden).  Then we just kind of let it ride.  With all of our rain and humidity, our container garden is overflowing, and our plants are loving life.  There’s not too much more we needed to do, but given the opportunity to visit the farm of a family friend this weekend and pick out some rocks for our garden, we had to jump at it.  Thanks to that, we now have three new additions that give our landscaping that extra something.

We weren’t just rock hunting of course or tiling this weekend.  We did have some fun.  Dain tried his hand at riding the atv around the farm, which basically turned him into a kid in a candy store as evidenced by his uber-cheesy grin.

We also managed to work in some family time on our rock hunting adventure since my brother and his wife, along with their four children joined us for the fun.  The kids were pretty into it.

The farm was awesome, with a ton of open land to roam around on including a little creek to cross and skip stones on.

It was also full of rocks.  There were some really big ones, but unfortunately, the weight capacity on the Red Rocket is almost non-existent.  So we picked out these three small gems to bring home and make part of our garden.They don’t look too big, but they were heavy, testing the strength of even our Iron Brigade wheelbarrow (not that it takes that much…our dirt hauling almost did it in earlier this year).

After we picked the perfect spots for our rock friends, Dain raked away the wood chips.

And then dug out a little hole for each rock to set in.

Check out the terrific three.

As you can see up by that last rock, we put in a piece of driftwood gifted to us from my dad.  We also added a few solar lights around the front garden thanks to a clearance at Target.  We were a little skeptical about lights for $1.50 each, but they are still kicking after almost two months.

Overall, it’s quite the improvement over what we had back in June when everything looked pretty puny.

Now it is flourishing, and we think the rocks, driftwood, and solar lights add a little something.

From our container garden, we have managed to harvest a whole two jalapeno peppers along with a bunch of basil, dill, cilantro, and mint that we have been using regularly.  How’s your garden growing?  Have you added any decoration like rocks, driftwood, or solar lights?