If you had two hundred bucks in a sock, would you use it to buy:

a) 25 latte ventis at Starbucks?

b) a nice car wash and detailing for your old minivan?

c) or five tons of Haliburton stone?

If you were a dry-stone waller, the correct answer goes without saying.

I had scrounged stone from a number of sources at our cottage on Minden Lake, but the cupboard was bare, so to speak.  To be ready for the garden terrace project this summer, I needed a fresh supply. So I put in a call to a guy who knows stone.

Brent Coltman provides excavation services in the Minden-Haliburton area.  He comes by the profession honestly — his Dad, Wayne, still works in the “aggregates” business into his 80s — quarrying stone, sand and gravel and other materials for construction in the area.

Stone riches

The Minden-Haliburton area is rich in Canadian shield stone, including granite with its rich reddish-grey hues, and older sedimentary stone.  The area is crisscrossed by a fault line that has pushed ancient stone into view. A trip north on highway 35 features some stunning granite rock cuts — such as the one near Miner’s Bay.

Brent has a gravel pit on 100 acres of bush, where he processes material from excavations. Sand, for example, is screened in a giant mechanized machine. The final product is used as a clean and porous bed for new septic systems.

I visited Brent at the pit and we agreed on a nice pile of small and mid-size stone, as well as the price —  $200 dollars. The next morning, as I watched a pair of bluebirds build their nest in a box near our cottage, I heard Brent’s large dump-truck chugging down our small cottage lane.

The eagle had landed

Despite a tight space, Brent backed up expertly to the delivery site, and tipped five tons of stone onto our cottage lawn. He also gave me the contact information for his dad, as I needed some special stone for stairs and capstones. I would get that later.

The eagle had landed. On this multiple choice question, I had selected option c).

Nesting instinct

With a good supply of stone, it was time to start excavating the site for the stone terrace garden.  The stonework would create a kind of nest for the pretty little log cabin that Nadine’s dad built years ago.  The cabin, situated on a sloping hill in the woods, would get a stone terrace in front. A few shade-loving plants would green up and beautify the area in front of the porch. The log cabin would also be shored up in the back with a dry-stone retaining wall, to create some breathing room and better drainage against the slope behind it.

Nadine and I scoped out the stone terrace area.  With a tape measure, I marked two spots for a line parallel with the cabin’s front. Using a standard round-edged garden spade, I started excavating the area for the first terrace, one shovelful of sand at a time.

Once I got the excavation area roughed in, I put in two posts and tied a string in between. This would guide the building of a straight and level wall.

I continued excavating the site to allow a wall roughly seven feet long by 2 1/2 feet wide at the base.  The terrace would rise to about three feet high, to create the little green space level with the cabin front porch.

For a porous and flexible base for the dry stone wall, I put down a couple inches of gravel and tamped it down using an 8×8-inch hand tamper, all the while checking that the site stayed level.

Curating stone

Next up was stone selection. Using a small but sturdy hand-dolly, I started to load up the bigger stones and deliver them to the site. These would comprise the terrace foundation. To save my sore back, I tried to use gravity and leverage to my advantage, and trundle the material carefully down the hill on the dolly. Stones of similar heft and shape were grouped together near the site. Most of these foundation stones weighed 30 to 50 pounds and would provide a integral footprint for the terrace.

As the bigger stones were pulled from the pile, I also looked for mid-sized building stones to be used later, as well as the small “heart-stones” that would pack the centre of the structure.  These were all delivered to the job site by dolly or wheelbarrow.

To get a sense of the utility of each stone, you can flip it around. Ideally it has two straighter opposing sides, and a front that will give a gentle angle, or “batter” for the face of the wall. Each stone has its own beauty, heft, colour, character and faults. After a while, the stones start to speak to you. A stone waller in the stone selection phase might even admit to dreaming about stone.

 

A moveable feast

As I concentrated on finding nice stones, the first wave of June blackflies feasted on my neck and a hot sun found its way through the trees. Curating stone can be a dreamy but prickly business.

As stones were sorted and delivered to the job site, my 5-ton, $200-dollar pile of stone was slowly starting to shrink.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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