Stones on my mind or (rocks in my head)

Sunday afternoon at the local Home Depot.  I really hate shopping but sometimes it pays off.  I needed to buy some rocks (as silly as that sounds in New Hampshire), and I do not own enough barren property or a garden to “grow my own” so I have to buy them.   

Home Depot sells various types of rocks in feed bag sized plastic wrappers that are small enough to move without equipment but big enough so that you feel that you are getting something for your three to five dollars a bag.   They offer many types of crushed gravel, crushed stone, river stones, and beach stones.  They have to have a little marketing so the rounded stones are “Mexican beach stones”.  The crushed marble is “ornamental”, and the granite is “antique” which is what I was buying today.  I thought that the concept of a stone being “antique” was interesting because this particular batch of stones that I was purchasing were made before humans or even most dinosaurs were walking around looking for a home depot.

I guess granite looks “antique” because it has a multitude of colors all mixed together rather than the pure color of some of the other types of stone available.

There are also a wide variety of mulches on sale right next to the rocks.  All types of tree bark, wood chips, and moss are sprayed with black, red, and brown dye so that they look “more consistent” even though they are made from different trees from different forests.  The colors are so bright that in my neighborhood it sometimes looks like the gardens are covered with froot loop cereal (which might be cheaper, I will have to look into it).  All of these colorful bags of byproduct have a 2 to 10 year guarantee that the color won’t wash out to postpone that day when you wander out of your house and find that your garden is covered with *gasp* tree bark!

One of the more interesting choices for colorful waste products to cover your ground with is “Rubber Mulch”.  This “mulch” looks like nuggets of red or black rubber made from old tires.

The rubber in tires is not naturally black of course, the tires on old cars were white or tan, but adding carbon black to the rubber made it harder to see the mold defects.

We no longer have many mold defects but people are so used to the black color that it would be difficult to market anything else.   So after tires have served their useful life they are recycled, which is an interesting process where the tire dealers pay to dump them at massive tire dumps where owners/husbands explain to their wives that “these things are worth a fortune!” until they catch on fire and burn for 2.5 years.

Sometimes a small percentage of tires DO get recycled, and now the companies that used to make door mats have branched out into the landscaping industry.   They melt the tires into chunks and try to cover the end result with a “natural cedar color” to hide the coloring that was added to hide the “natural rubber color” of the tire when it was made.  These have color guarantees too.  At least the shredded bark will decompose after the coloring washes off, but the rubber will probably just turn into black bite sized tire nuggets, which I assume you will cover with a thick layer of lifetime guaranteed CD/DVD nuggets with rainbow colors that you purchase at your local “Amazon landscaping supply” in another decade or so.

Anyhow, back to Home Depot on a Sunday afternoon.   I had finished overloading my flat railroad dolly with so many rocks that I noticed the solid-rubber tread on the solid-steel wheels had popped off and were just wrapped around the axle like a rubber band, I guess I should have made two trips.   So before I pushed my barge of “Antique stone” and “Mexican Beach Stone” towards the cashier, I was taking a minute to help an older couple load some rocks onto their cart.  The lady commented on “how tightly the store packs these bags together” and I replied that gravity tends to do that and added “imagine how much the trucks carrying these rocks from a Mexican beach to Keene NH must weigh” and she replied with the proper “Oh my, I hadn’t thought of that”.

We were finishing up when a family came up and was comparison shopping the choices of stone.  They were leaning toward the bright white marble chunks when the son-in law noticed that the rubber rocks “Last for TWELVE YEARS”, Mom replied that she won’t even be alive in twelve years (even though she was much younger than me), and you kids can replace the rocks when you own the house.  The son-in-law was undeterred, he said “these are good for twelve years, how long is the marble good for?”  Mom looked all over the bag and said “It says ‘Longest Lasting’ but it doesn’t say HOW LONG.”   They loaded their cart with red rubber rocks.   I grinned all the way while pushing my overfilled cart of billion year old rocks to my car..

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