Nature's playground

A couple of weekends ago, having a respite from soccer and/or baseball games, Scott began to do some "yardwork".  By yardwork I mean actually creating a yard from the piles of dirt and rock that still surround our new house.  The lack of grass outside means a lot of dirt and sand get tracked into the house by the kids and the dog.  Plus, green, growing things feed my soul...I love gardening and am really missing my time with nature.  I know dirt is natural, too, but it's just not the same.

Here are some pictures of the side yard after dh spread out a big pile of loam.  I was excited to begin to see the shape of the future lawn.

As he was shaping the back bank, he noticed that the 2 outcroppings of ledge that we could see, were actually part of one large slab of bedrock just below the surface.  So he began scraping off the dirt with his machinery.  Then he hand shoveled out the nooks and crannies.  Now, if you didn't know my stoic husband well, you wouldn't have noticed anything unusual, but I could tell he was getting excited.  It was cute.  Is it only excavating contractors who get excited about rocks?
Anyway, after he shoveled it off, he needed to power wash the ledge to finish cleaning all the dirt off.  He has a powerwasher, but he had the wrong nozzle.  After a trip to my brother-in-law's house to get the right nozzle, he was ready to clean that ledge off.  If any of this sounds time-consuming...it was!! The entire process took most of the day.  Here's the finished product:

The kids (and their dad) loved it!!  The veining in the stone reminded them of roads, so out came the matchbox cars.  They spent a long time climbing on the ledge and setting up cars to race down it, crashing and tumbling over the uneven surface. 

I love the look of it also, and think about how much time we will save mowing! So ,we ended up not planting grass that particular weekend, but we did end up with a new playstructure.  The best kind.  Indestructible.