Our soil is filled with river rocks, which I’ve always thought odd because we are on a hill. We used to live a mile away, but on the other side of the freeway, just south of the 8 and it was the same thing. Digging out a hole to plant a tree took MUCH longer than needed because of all the river rock. It is not much fun.
So from all of the demolition in the back yard (still need to write about the back yard) we unearthed many river rocks. The previous owners had their own rock pile as well. Between the two I thought that we might have enough to create a dry creek bed. My thought is that the more I xeriscape the less that I have to water and the more personality our yard gets. If I can do it on the cheap, by using found materials native to my area all the better! All that to say, I have now dug out a path for the dry creek bed in front of our house.
Over the course of a weekend I hauled rocks collected from my yard (yes my soil is filled with these) and placed them in the ditch that I made.
After the digging I took my trusty roll of weed barrier fabric and rolled it out above the dry creek bed. In areas like this where plants are not growing, it works amazingly well at keeping weeds at bay, at least for the first 5-7 years or so and then they start to get through. Even then, it is better than the places where you do not lay it.
The next several days, working for only about an hour in the morning (did I mention that I had the brilliant notion of doing this in the middle of a heat wave?) I placed the rocks into the trench.
View a mock up of what our front yard will hopefully look like.
