Tiny little stones un-rubbished

waste-stone ramp

One of the neato things about building with earth is that there are no waste products.  Everything is a building product, whether you know what to do with it or not.

When we wash the wheelbarrow or the mixer, we keep the washing-water because it contains perfectly good clay for the next mix.  Even when we wash our gloves and tools, we are harvesting clay for next time.

When the strip footings were dug for the walls, the digger dumped two big piles - one of sub-soil and one of odd-sized rubble rocks.  

Clay sticks to things, so harvesting it means basically washing it off things.  We harvest clay out of the sub-soil pile by throwing spade-fulls into the mixer, adding water and pressing the start button.  The clay is washed off the hundreds of tiny little stones, and we pour it out.  Inside the mixer, all the little stones are leftover.  

We've been dumping and compacting the little stones about the building site to make ramps for the wheelbarrow.  We hadn't really thought much about it until we started noticing the pretty colours the tiny little stones were starting to go, after a few months of sun and rain.

So, we've decided to abandon plans to buy fill and pavers to make a floor for the verandah.  TJ took the pile of leftover rock-rubble, dumped it under the verandah and tamped it down - pause here and look at the photo and contemplate the size of the task.  He did it in one day.  That's 6m x 1.5m x up to 10cm deep.  The pile was exactly the right size, which is spooky.

Rubble base for tiny little stone topping

Now gradually as we build, we will spread the tiny little stones from the bottom of the mixer over the rubble base and tamp them down a bit.  It won't ever be absolutely stable like proper paving, but it will make a perfectly safe and really quite pretty flat surface that crunches satisfactorily when you walk on it. It will blend aesthetically with the walls because the walls and the stones spent millions of years together before we came along.

Now, since this is a bit of a random post about 'ain't nature neat', here's a picture of a golden orb weaver web.

Golden Orb-weaver web is golden

I managed to get well into middle age before somebody pointed out the bleeding obvious -  that these webs are actually golden - it's not a trick of the light.  I'm clearly at my least observant when I've nearly walked into a spider the size of a tea-cup.  This year, which is either a really good or bad year for spiders generally (depending on your point of view), the Golden Orb-weavers are about the size of tea-pots.