Gathering Rocks for Gardening - Growing The Home Garden

This week my family spent a few hours gathering and hauling rock from our home construction site. When we bought the property we knew that were were “gifted” with lots of rock on the site but the amount of rock is really much more than we imagined. Surface rock was visible in many areas of the property. Rock can be very expensive to remove but can be an amazing resource for gardening!

Our builder had a ram hoe brought in to break up some of these rocks to allow the foundation and water lines to be dug. A ram hoe is an attachment that fits onto a back hoe and works like a jack hammer. They ran the machine for a day and broke up tons of rock and were able to complete our foundation area and water line. That brings us back to where we are today and gathering rock!

Rocks as a Resource

Rocks are an fantastic resource for garden designs. Hard surfaces can make nice walkways, borders for garden beds, or be placed as decorative features. When designing a garden with rocks the only limit is your imagination. I love using rocks and having plants drape over them. Creeping plants like phlox can help to soften the hard edges of the rock.

Our focus on gathering rock during this work session was to remove as many of the useful rocks as we could from where the house will be. After the foundation was poured there were lots of loose rocks scattered about that will eventually be inaccessible as construction continues. Since the building will cover the area there was no sense leaving them lying under there.

What we Found

We found several types of rocks. Nice flat rocks for stepping stones, small chunky rocks for garden beds, and all types in between. I enjoy making pathways using natural rocks and stepping stones. Anything flat with about 1.5 to 2 inches of width will work great for stepping stones.

This pile of rocks is just what we were able to gather up from a couple hours of work. There are quite a few more rocks to find. Depending on how much rock we can accumulate I’m hoping to build some of everything from the list below!