Creating Zen In Your Own Japanese Garden

How did y’all spend your loooong holiday weekend? I hope it wasn’t at work? 😦 As for yours truly, it was spent working on our poor, neglected yard.

It’s been over a year since we moved in, but because of all of the wedding planning hysteria, the only work we’ve been able to do was to put in a handful of stepping stones to our side garden. With our lives settling down a bit more, there’s been more time to devote to the crib. As such, we’ve taken on the challenge of doing a Japanese garden.

After several months spent studying books, shopping at Home Depot and Kiso and sweating bullets in the yard, our masterpiece is complete. Not bad for first time green thumb-ers eh?

Our Japanese Garden

Wanna build your own? Here’s what we did.

1) Bought bamboo border from Home Depot. It was about $7 per yard.
2) Bought 3.5 tons of filler 3/4 Grade A aggregate blue rock from Ameron Hawaii (yes, 3.5 tons… I bundled the order with a few friends). Retail was about $165 plus hauling ($122.10).
3) Bought the rest of the rocks (3 rock-like cement stepping stones, 2 bags of large river rocks for edging and 3 bags of Manchurian Jade river rock for river bed) from Kiso Store (94-995 Waipahu St Waipahu, HI. 96797, Phone: 808-671-7482). Total was about $140 something.
4) After digging the dirt appropriately, you pretty much just lay everything out over the weed blocker first layer.

Here’s an animation of the fruits of our labor.

Animation of Our Japanese Garden

Whatchu tink? Any tips of advice from you expert yard peeps? Stuffs to add? Things to do to enhance da buggah? Anything! I’m all ears.

Tags: Ameron Hawaii, bamboo border, blue rock, building your own japanese garden, cement stepping stones, creating your own japanese garden, edging, Home Depot, japanese garden, Kiso Store, large river rocks, Manchurian Jade river rock, president's day weekend, river bed, river rock, weed blocker, yard work, zen