Spring Comes in with a Bobcat...

You've heard the expression, "Spring came in with a bang"... well, in my case, it all started with a Bobcat.  That is, our neighbor Jerry's Bobcat. 

If you recall, Eric and I decided to create a new driveway, one that is level, one that wouldn't leave us stranded in snow, and one that wouldn't leave our friends and family members without four-wheel drive stranded in even good weather.  The old driveway is still there, and connected to the new.  It's a convenient way for the UPS and FedEx delivery trucks that visit us almost daily to come in and circle out with ease.  They both used to struggle leaving, shooting gravel at our house as they peeled out up the steep incline. 

To keep our new driveway functioning and looking great, we decided it would be best to add a retaining wall to stop erosion.  When installing the driveway, Jerry had already repurposed part of the stacked boulders that had surrounded the 2-car parking pad that we tore out to make way for the new drive.  So, we decided it would be nice to continue the theme and make everything look cohesive.  Many of the boulders were starting to crumble and crack though, so while we liked the idea of rock, we were sure we'd need to choose a different type.

We headed to a local rock yard and picked out our rocks, 5 palettes to be exact.  Realizing a delivery fee was inevitable, and how much we had already gotten ourselves into, expense-wise, we also threw in a load of topsoil and an enormous granite boulder covered in lichen that I discovered on our way down to the weigh station.  Let me just say rocks are really expensive.

Jerry and Eric made short work of the palettes and the resulting retaining wall looks great.



All I see when I look at this is major rock garden potential!

The delivery guy was kind enough to place my granite boulder at the entrance to the new drive.  It looks wonderful, but just as I suspected, it looks a fair bit smaller than it did in the rock yard.  That's okay.  I still love it.  My mom and I have joked for years when we've been out in some great park or in the woods that "we'll take that rock over there".  It's always the most ginormous rock in the whole place -- think Elephant Rocks big.  I've got the small chip that fell off one of those.



I should have had Tyler pose with it to give you a sense of size... perhaps in a future post.