I spend a lot of time moving rocks. I'd have to call it my hobby at this point.
I take breaks from building the tiny house by lugging rocks from the woods to the streamlet I've been redirecting a bit, creating mini-waterfalls so I can fill watering cans and shallow basins where I can wash my hands off. I've also hauled five thousand rocks (or maybe just four thousand) to create a wall where we did some terracing. I've gone on scavenger hunts far and wide in the forest to find slices of slate to use for two walkways. I've lined stones along little trails we forged. I've build up small beds in a rock garden (of sorts) that I've filled with transplanted native stock; the garden tumbles down a slope to the creek. And then there are all the cairns I find myself stacking for no good reason except that I like to stack stones.
All this is possible because we live in a magical spot littered (in a good way) with stone. A tumble of gray boulders, smaller nuggets of white quartz and slabs of slate run down the side of the mountain we're on. My weight lifting these days consists of moving countless of these specimens from the forest slope to our build site.
Using native materials--wood, wildflowers, stone--has become an integral part of everything we do to develop our tiny home site. I need to study up on native flora and I fully intend on replacing my woeful ignorance regarding these local rocks with a little geologic awareness. At present, I'm stumbling on passages like this one, courtesy of the USGS: "Rocks of Loudoun County record a sequential tectonic history of orogeny (Mesoproterozoic Grenvillian), continental rifting (Late Proterozoic Iapetan), the transition from rift to passive continental margin (Early Cambrian), orogenic accretion and deformation (Middle Ordovician Taconian and late Paleozoic Alleghanian), and continental rifting (Triassic and Jurassic) and reflects several Wilson Cycles of opening and closing ocean basins (Wilson, 1966)."
In the meanwhile, ignorance is bliss. I've written before about my fondness for stone; now I'm just trying to put my hobby to use as we shape the outdoor "rooms" of our tiny house.
I take breaks from building the tiny house by lugging rocks from the woods to the streamlet I've been redirecting a bit, creating mini-waterfalls so I can fill watering cans and shallow basins where I can wash my hands off. I've also hauled five thousand rocks (or maybe just four thousand) to create a wall where we did some terracing. I've gone on scavenger hunts far and wide in the forest to find slices of slate to use for two walkways. I've lined stones along little trails we forged. I've build up small beds in a rock garden (of sorts) that I've filled with transplanted native stock; the garden tumbles down a slope to the creek. And then there are all the cairns I find myself stacking for no good reason except that I like to stack stones.
All this is possible because we live in a magical spot littered (in a good way) with stone. A tumble of gray boulders, smaller nuggets of white quartz and slabs of slate run down the side of the mountain we're on. My weight lifting these days consists of moving countless of these specimens from the forest slope to our build site.
Using native materials--wood, wildflowers, stone--has become an integral part of everything we do to develop our tiny home site. I need to study up on native flora and I fully intend on replacing my woeful ignorance regarding these local rocks with a little geologic awareness. At present, I'm stumbling on passages like this one, courtesy of the USGS: "Rocks of Loudoun County record a sequential tectonic history of orogeny (Mesoproterozoic Grenvillian), continental rifting (Late Proterozoic Iapetan), the transition from rift to passive continental margin (Early Cambrian), orogenic accretion and deformation (Middle Ordovician Taconian and late Paleozoic Alleghanian), and continental rifting (Triassic and Jurassic) and reflects several Wilson Cycles of opening and closing ocean basins (Wilson, 1966)."
In the meanwhile, ignorance is bliss. I've written before about my fondness for stone; now I'm just trying to put my hobby to use as we shape the outdoor "rooms" of our tiny house.