Ammi Midstokke: Rocks are the budget landscaper’s best resource

When you’re one of those I-can-do-it people, there is a tendency to claim abilities that one really just aspires to have, or assumes are easy enough to figure out on YouTube.

This is apparent particularly when you’re going through your build budget with your contractor and striking line item after line item because, “I can do that myself.”

Meanwhile, my husband has learned to sit strategically out of my visual field and communicate in panicked-husband sign language through a series of signals that look rather like a baseball player wearing a Carhartt uniform while having a seizure. I only caught him miming a noose when I threatened/offered to help the tile guy.

The combination of my certainty of capabilities and my husband’s avoidance of conflict somehow resulted in us not having any budget line item for landscaping. Whatever that is. It sounds like some sort of city folk means of organizing hoity-toity grasses in a checkered pattern.

We’ll be having none of that. We’ll scape on our own, thank you very much, I had said, striking some $50,000 or so off the budget. Did they think we were going to import trees of gold?

Also, we were building a house in the woods. The land is scaped already. Or at least it was before Charlie borrowed a track hoe in February and we discovered a 60-foot piece of granite under our planned foundation. My dreamy naturalist ideas of “landing softly in nature” were obliterated by several other tractors I cannot name and dozens of truck loads of fill. Judging by the artifacts I’ve found, “fill” is scraped up from an illegal shooting range where high schoolers throw keggers.

It does not appear that native lupine is particular to growing on it.

Waking up on our first morning, I was thrilled to see myself surrounded by tree tops until I stood up and remembered that my house is now perched on a wasteland of bad choices and big rock. I am sure I asked something like, “When do the plant guys come?” at which point my husband reminded me that I had volunteered us to do all the landscaping. And since we didn’t have a line item in the budget for it, I better do a little research on how to transplant things.

I notice my neighbors have some well-established irises, but I have to wait until the moon is new. Not because I know anything about planting according to the lunar calendar, but because I’m going to need it to be real dark.

I went to the tree store to try to buy some trees. A budget of $300 will get you something that will shade a family of mice, but the master gardeners reminded me that my children will enjoy the girth of them with their children long after I’m gone. I bought some hoity-toity grass to plant in a checkered pattern instead. The dogs have eaten most of it.

Our landscaping woes were solved this weekend when I found the pile of rocks my husband collected over the last year of building, as if he knew I’d need them someday.

Growing up on a mountainside where and when winters lasted long and summers were a Thursday afternoon in July, our “landscaping” mostly involved placing circles of rocks around anything in order to make it look intentionally planted. Ponderosa or thistle, all plants were equal in the eyes of the backwoods-impoverished yard architect.

I have a little rock trauma from growing up: It was how our parents disciplined us. Talking back might result in hauling 50 rocks from the not-so-nearby creek. There was a minimum of 6 inches in diameter and when we got cheap with our stones, my dad came out with a tape measure and made us haul the small ones back.

I’m pretty sure my sassafras and petty crimes were responsible for most of that yard’s curated look. A few years ago, I rode my bike up to my childhood home and those stones were covered with moss, woven together in a fairy tale forest of lush plants and lichen that only years – decades even – can offer. So when I noticed Charlie’s rock pile (all of them would pass my dad’s quality controls), I knew that I had the answer to our landscaping problem.

With a few trips of our rusty, hazardous wheelbarrow, I had decorated our barren slope with, well, rocks. Honestly, I probably just put them back where they were before we scraped off the nature. Why I had such a sense of pride and redemption about it, I’m not sure.

Thankfully, one of us (the patient one – so obviously, not me) has some foresight and has been tossing out pounds and pounds of seed for weeks. The spring rains have turned them into tiny plants, a kind of pubescent fuzz of forest with all the promise of turning into a full-fledged fire hazard by September. That same person also knows how to install sprinklers. Which is great because those rocks have a lovely glisten to them when they’re wet. They offer balance to the sparkle of the occasional broken bottle.

Ammi Midstokke is researching topsoil and lightweight wheelbarrows. She can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com