River Rock

Our covered front porch/carport is 64 feet long. Love it. It's got about a 12 inch overhang with gutters that gives lots of shade and added drip protection. We wanted the grass to grow up to the edge of that porch - easy maintenance because you just mow or weed-whack right up to the concrete. 

Well, you know what they say about best laid plans, right? Yeah - they often fail. In this case the ground simply didn't get enough rain to support the grass well. If we watered directly onto that strip the grass was lush and green. Let Mother Nature take over and it died out in patches. I guess the drainage under the concrete porch just sucks down all the moisture. Good for the porch, bad for greenery.

So we decided to do a stone border. I didn't want #2 stone (gravel to most folks but not to the rock guys) as that's jagged and it hurts to step on it. So, river rock! But we didn't want to pay for rock (yes, we're cheap). Craig's List to the rescue! A very pleasant woman had a river rock walkway all the way around her house and she hated it. We could have as much as we wanted as long as we did the work. Cool.

So we took our yard cart, several 5-gallon bucks, a hoe/rake, and a transfer shovel and got to work. I moved stone to bucket with the flat transfer shovel (we didn't want to create holes in her pathway since she was going to have to fill that area back in with something) and Chris moved and emptied the buckets. We filled the bed of the truck and there was so much pathway left! We felt a bit bad that we weren't taking more, but that was going to be plenty for our needs.

As is typically the case when you get something free there was work to be done with it. The rocks were full of dirt and debris. So we raked, washed, raked, and finally hand picked to fill a shallow trench in front of the porch. 

Pretty mix of shapes and colors

I think it looks great and will be much better than the scraggly dirt and grass we had previously.

Rock in place. Grass slowly recovering from winter.