Waterfalls & Tufa

I am aching from this weekend.  Saturday I chopped down 4 forsythia bushes. I also planted some primroses and a blueberry bush. The big project was making the bamboo lattice for the Japanese garden. I bought a 100 piece bale of 3/4″ x 8′ bamboo stalks.  I made a 7′x5′ screen using Ibo knots.  They say you can’t use a power saw, but I found I could cut using the compound mitre saw if I went slowly.

My mom brought home a big puddingstone rock for the pond.  After hauling the big rock out..which is incredibly heavy. I had to do some fiddling but I got the new stone to work.

It was supposed to rain on sunday, but when I got up the weather report said it would be sunny and 73°. Vanessa called me to ask if I wanted her to come help, moments after I had decided not to call her yet because it was still early.  We made plans for her to come lunchtime and I went out to get hypertufa making supplies, some planters, and maybe some plants.

The first thing Vanessa & I did was foam the waterfall. A lot of water was falling behind the rocks - so you use this special expanding foam to fill in the cracks. I learned from the last time I used this and got us both rubber gloves.  That takes some time to expand and cure, so we started on the hypertufa projects. I wanted a water basin for the japanese garden and a trough for a fountain in the front garden ( or dooryard . We mixed up some tufa using 1 part portland cement: 1.5 parts peat moss : 1.5 parts sand.  For the water basin I put a small bowl upside down in a large plastic bucket and stuck a 1″ pvc pipe in the middle. We packed the hypertufa around the pipe and bowl. That was pretty easy.

For the trough I had brought out a plastic bin. We changed up the recipe for this to mix the sand up with 1/2 perlite. It took us about 3 tries to get this to work. We abandoned the bin and instead I built a quick wooden form and we packed the tufa inside.   We wrapped them up in plastic bags to start curing. I bought way too much portland cement and the bags weigh 94lbs! I want to make more but I figured we should see how these turn out first. I will unmold and do some sculpting on them when I get home today.

After that we did some more planting. I bought a bunch of bright colored perennial flowers at Home Depot. The waterfall looked good so we could finally plant the beds I put around it. I had bought a Mountain Atlas Daisy and a purple Salvia for that and they worked great. We also tucked some of the Mountain Pinks that we got for $1 in there. I placed the LED lights in the pond too.

When my dad came home we mounted the bamboo trellis and I planted the clematis on the far side. I had a climbing honeysuckle already planted.

I am quite happy with what we got accomplished and it’s only the first weekend in may! I wasn’t even in NJ until the beginning of June last year.

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