The East Garden Project

Amos and I (mostly Amos) have been working on two new hardscape areas in the east garden. The idea is to minimize maintenance. I think it is working out well. I wanted to do an 'afterthought' and put it all in one place, since I have been posting here and there on different social media sites.

The highlighted links below are to some short videos of the work in progress.


We started out with a very rough overgrown area early this spring. Tao's garden and the orchard.

Amos stripped the two areas and put down ground cloth.

You can see, it is still early spring. The trees are not leafed out yet.

Next came the gravel. Not owning a truck, it took many trips with buckets in the back of the SUV and a lot of shoveling on Amos' part. I wanted the gravel at least two inches deep, so anything (like the violet thugs in the garden) tried to take hold, we could easily pull them out.

Now comes the time for the icing on the cake, as you might say. This creates a lot of gray in the garden and I like color, so now we add detail.

The clerodendrum tree in Tao's garden has red and turquoise colored berries, so I am going to put accents of blue in that area. I intend trying some glass around each stepping stone.

First I dug a 1/2 trench around the stepping stone and filled it with quickset cement. The cement has small stones in it already, so placing a minimal amount of glass around the stones and in the finer dust of the mixture seemed to be appropriate.

I had some leftover glass pieces from previous projects. You can see the cement mixture in the paper cup. It's dry at this point. And the square container is full of additional gravel to build a little edge to hold the cement in place.

I placed the glass within easy reach and started surrounding the stepping stone.

When finished, I took my hose with the sprayer set on 'mist' and wet the cement thoroughly down. Now, we will wait 24 hours for it to dry. See if I like the results and if I do, I will proceed to outline the rest of the stones.

After I complete those, then it will be on to the other area, to build a fairy village around the old apple tree stump and I think a Mandela in the larger expanse of gray using cement and Japanese river rock.