Our temperatures have fallen below normal now and we have been getting rain showers and/or thunderstorms every couple of days, making it difficult for me to stay in the garden for long.
I've contented myself with working on the hardscape. For the last five years, I've had a little pre-formed pond (about 430 gallons) that I have minimally aquascaped. The sound of running water is particularly soothing on warm - okay, make that hot - summer nights. But this year I wanted something different in terms of a water feature and when I was reading one of the three home and garden magazines to which I subscribe, I fell in love with the very clean lines of a - get this - galvanized steel stock tank. The one I got from a local agricultural supply company is round and is four feet in daimeter and two feet deep. I dug out the old pond, backfilled the hole and have leveled the surface with pea gravel, whch should prevent some "ucky" splashing of mud onto the sides of the tank during rains. I have my eye on a fountainhead at a local business, and will probably wander over there sometime this rainy weekend to buy it.
A couple of years ago I was the lucky recipient of some good sized snow quartz from a friend who discovered her dream parcel of ground for her home was actually about 3 inches of soil on top of a mountain of natural snow quartz. (She has dug and used a whole lot of it in her own garden, including some huge boulders big enough to climb on that were excavated when the house was being built. But when you live on a small mountain of the stuff, there's more than you can use. I thought she was incredibly generous to tell everyone she knew to please come and get all they could haul away.)
I've used some of mine to enlarge and encircle my outdoor altar. I also added some of the pea gravel inside the circle. I think it will be a comfortable and cool surface for my bare feet during ritual.
