First time poster: Rock Yard DYI help requested

20 tons is about 30 yards of crushed aggregate, depending on the stone and size. Have you ever seen a 30 yard pile of crushed stone?

Garden rake and shovel ain’t gonna get it

At minimum you’ll want to rent a compact tractor with box blade

a rock yard? seems like an incredible waste of money and a future broken ankle.
You might as well just Brady Bunch it and put turf down if you don't feel like watering it and cutting it.

It is a BITCH to maintain compared to grass. I know that is counterintuitive BUT weeds are going to drive you insane. RoundUp only kills them...they still look like hell, especially in a lawn. The only way to maintain them is to pull weeds. Landscaping fabric helps for a while but only for a couple of years. I had about 1000 square feet in our yard in New Mexico and Washington and I could get by with cutting grass a couple of times a month but I was pulling weeds in those damned rocks weekly and it always looked like it needed some attention. I have a bank in our yard now thats 8 feet high sloping down to nothing over 150 feet. Its about 70 degrees most of that distance. I have class 2 granite rip rap (about a foot in "diameter" on average) and a double layer of landscape fabric under it. The soil beneath the landscape fabric is comprised almost entirely of shale. There is almost no top soil or other organic material under the landscape fabric. The problem is that dust settles between the rocks, weed seeds blow in the wind and they need nearly no soil to germinate and flourish. I spend an inordinate amount of time and energy fricking with those weeds and they almost always look like crap. Fire will get them but it still looks bad. I'd think about it and talk to other people...maintaining a rock bed in good shape is a LOT of work. If leaves or pinestraw falls in them you can also plan on replacing them at least once a year. You won't have to buy them but blow the leaves or rake them and you are going to relocate every damn piece of gravel. And introduce the perfect environment for invasive weeds in the process.

1300 square feet of artificial turf is cheap. It is simple to install. Looks like crap in my opinion but it is very common in New Mexico and is pretty much the go to lawn in upscale neighborhoods. I suspect the maintenance, especially with trees around, is murder compared to a grass lawn, but I may be wrong.

If you put down Roundup Extended Control, and put it down quarterly, you won't have any weed problems in the rocks. But that's a pretty large area to have to spray and not have it drift and kill your other plants or neighbor's plants.

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If you put down Roundup Extended Control, and put it down quarterly, you won't have any weed problems in the rocks. But that's a pretty large area to have to spray and not have it drift and kill your other plants or neighbor's plants.

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I have taken to climbing up in them a couple of times a month and rounding them up closely and pulling them up. Does the extended control get rid of the dead plant also? The normal round up kills them graveyard dead but they are just dead and not green, still visible. Easier to pull than live ones though. It is a pain in the arse to climb up and pull weeds. Id do a proper retaining wall but the county insists on it being engineerd and I ain't paying someone to draw a picture of a retaining wall.