One of the principals of permaculture is to use what you have on the site.
What we have in abundance is rock - hard granite rock.
Above shows one of the sites where a huge boulder (or was it bedrock?) was blasted - I posted about it here. The site needed to be levelled out before the pergola could be built.
The biggest rocks were moved out of the pergola area to a temporary place near where they are to be used.
The middle-sized ones - the maximum size I can carry - have been used to edge garden beds. I like making rock garden edges. Taylor placed bigger rocks under the cedar fence to stop baby deer from crawling under it.
The smallest rocks from the site plus all of those on the to-be pathways and those I dig out of the garden beds are collected up and wheelbarrowed....
...to make a random rock edge on the right side of the pathway going up the east side of the house to the front. For the edge on the left of the path, I am fitting the rocks together to define Gunilla's garden bed. This was the first rock work I attempted and my skill level has improved so much since then I will be going back to rework this little wall.
Rock from the blast site where the sheds are to be built was moved by Josh using the Bobcat to make a random rock wall along the track, post here. The rock wall had a lot of soil as well which I didn't want because the seeds in the soil would grow and cover the rocks.
I spent many hours cleaning off the rocks with the frequent rains helping the job along.
Once I had cleared most of the soil off I scattered about 15 different types of seeds hoping they would germinate in the remaining soil pockets.
It has been a lot of work moving these rocks in place but with good planning, we haven't had to move them far and we are making use of all of them. We will not have to pay for any rock removal.
"Use what you have" - check.
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