***Official gardening, landscape and yardwork thread***

[seclark]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

I'm kind of proud of myself even though I screwed up.

We added an egress window to our basement last month, and it required some landscape work. The landscapers leveled out a raised dirt bed that had a bunch of river rock, and then put the river rock back. The river rock ranges from the size of a marble to perhaps 3/4 of the size of a racquetball.

But I didn't know how this worked and my wife was out of town, so I got into trouble. The landscapers mixed the dirt with the rock when they replaced it, so when she got back into town she was displeased. They had put a weed barrier down, but there's not supposed to be dirt above it, just rock. If we have dirt, weeds will grow in our rock garden. So we had to somehow remove the dirt.

Now, this is a 40 foot by 7 foot rock garden. It's big. Plus, rocks are heavy and hard to deal with. We initially started by putting the rocks into a bucket, and then sweeping up the dirt, and it was terribly slow. We were doing perhaps 2 square feet an hour. Not good.

So we put our critical thinking skills to use. We made a big sieve out of a plastic shelf and started putting the rocks in the sieve. Then we would shake the sieve and tip it over. It was faster, but we were up to maybe 4 square feet per hour, and it exhausting.

I put my thinking hat on, and we made an investment in the next experiment. We bought a shopvac. We would then put the rocks in the sieve and run the shopvac over the weed barrier to get the dirt. That shopvac was powerful, and it gave us some good ideas.

After a number of experiments, we developed an optimal process, and it goes like this:

1. I run my shoes over the rock. It's river rock so it's kind of round, and I can move the bigger rocks.
2. My wife, wearing gloves and using some sort of garden claw thing, scrapes over the mid-sized rocks and pulls them forward.
3. I use the powerful shopvac on what's left, which is the dirt and small rocks sitting on top of the weed barrier. If I pressed the shopvac nozzle down hard, I could avoid sucking up the rocks and efficiently get the dirt down.

We get one section done, and then move downstream and move the next rocks to the clean section, which makes it efficient. We're no longer lifting rocks at all, just rolling them and clawing them a foot upstream.

After a bit of process optimization, we're now up to about 30 square feet per hour. It's hard work, but we're going to get this thing done.

At first she was going to buy it all bagged up because she thought it was cleaner. Then she went up and looked at it and decided they didn’t wash the river rock before they bagged it. So she went ahead and paid a truck to come and dump 6 tons on the carport.
Doesn’t like dirty river rock.
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