Where To Buy Tufa Rock
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So, tomorrow, we start building the extension to last year's little tufa garden... after our backs rest up from today's efforts, aided hugely by the 2 strong young fellows from the tufa supply company, at unloading the truck! Here is a portion of the raw materials scattered through our yard... a pallet (a ton) of tufa in various sizes, plus 5 massive boulders (several hundred more pounds), and 5 bags of half-inch tufa gravel...
Now you have to show the result too! I have never used tufa, don't think I can get it here in Norway either. While all my neighbours have brought stones and rocks out of their gardens I have brought the same into mine in tons. I use rock, stone, gravel, sand etc in all kind of beds, even Rhododendron plantings.
Hi, Krish! I got the tufa from Rocky Mountain Tufa in Brisco, B.C. - it's a very good place to deal with and their stone is reasonably priced, particularly if you are buying it in quantity. Here's a link to their site, if you want to look or inquire, and they advertise in the NARGS Rock Garden Quarterly, as well: From the info I was sent re. pricing, I see that they actually do mail order! (Wow, one would certainly want to check out the shipping cost for that! Tufa is relatively light, so far as rocks go, but I don't think I'd want to pay for mailing it to anybody!)
It's too bad you are not here next weekend, as they always bring a load of tufa to the Calgary Rock and Alpine Garden Plant Sale, which is on Saturday. But, a small number of other places in Calgary also sell tufa (probably supplied by RMT, I suspect). Ornamental Stone (403-275-5550) is one I discovered, as I did a little phoning around earlier on. You may see tufa rocks for sale that are drilled with large holes (2-3\" diameter) for planting... I would advise avoiding these, as the holes are much too large for successful planting. (If you want, you can drill your own planting holes easily, if you have access to a power drill with a wood bit - 1\" across is more like it.)
Okay, I guess I'm not that easily embarrassed ;D... here's the conclusion of Step 1, the laying of the major pieces, which have been firmed up with packed-in soil. Excuse all the dirt - it will get hosed off, before I partially fill the crevices with a gritty mix; then a top dressing of the tufa gravel will eventually go on.
I'll have to buy a few more pieces of tufa myself next weekend... it never fails in any stone project that I'm left at the end with a few pieces that don't seem to fit anywhere! We need a few transition pieces to mesh \"the mountain\" a bit more smoothly with the surroundings and to link it with the now-very-modest-seeming old tufa garden!
The photo doesn't seem to show the scale... the big boulders (described as \"2'x2' \") were miserable brutes to put in place. Despite that I am tall, and pretty strong and fit, I could only just wiggle them around and flop them over. DH was able, somehow, to bull them into place, after moving them with a dolly. Yikes, if it was just me, they'd still be laying where the guys left them yesterday!
1) I attempted to mesh it, more or less, to last year's little tufa garden in the foreground... (with a slight change in bedding plane direction there from the new bed to the old bed but just try to imagine the old bed is a rock slide or moraine... errr, yeah, that would explain it. ;D Hey, I'm a geologist - trust me! - this can happen! :D )2) The view from the back door... I don't like the contrast to the bark mulch that we used for all our paths... but, in its favour, bark mulch is a lot easier to weed than gravel, so I guess it can stay. (Remember I've already explained that I'm very lazy!)3) An imprint of a birch log in the tufa; even the lenticles are preserved.4) Lots of interesting crags5, 6) And many natural planting holes where the tufa formed around branches or where plant material may have decayed out.
Lori, it looks awesome... you've used tremendous restraint to not stuff plants in prematurely... observe the terrain, then make judgements about what should go where. Keep us posted, it is great fun \"watching\" a new garden being built... please keep showing us the progress.
Don't be afraid! Although the planting is the funniest, I like working with stone, tufa or not! It can be hard work but very satisfactory when finished.Now we are awaiting your plant choises! And the mature result in years to come....
Trond, so far as selecting plants, it is more the case of having to plant up all the seedlings I grew this spring... which I chose on the basis of things that were unfamiliar and sounded interesting! Yes, pretty well-thought-out and restrained, I know... ;D ;DI ordered from the NARGS and SRGC seed exchanges, did a couple of trades, and then... swooned at the seedlists produced by the Czech seed collectors, Mojmir Pavelka and Vojtech Holubec, and made wildly-adventuresome orders! It was great fun to grow them, and it will be fascinating to see which species are able to winter over here. I am hoping that our relative high elevation/cool summers will be favorable to some of the high alpine species from China and elsewhere. Many of the seeds were collected from plants growing in limestone areas, so that may be positive for the tufa bed (though I admit it was not a factor in choosing the seeds).
Thanks! I brace myself, however, for comments of a more critical nature, which one must always expect when \"opening up\" on a public forum! Re. tufa vs. other rock, I am surprised that we (DH and I) now seem to prefer the look of the tufa, as compared to the so-called \"iron ledgestone\" (siliceous slate) we used in the other bed. Something of a change, as we'd both considered the tufa not terribly attractive, albeit very useful for alpine-growing. Going forward, as we extend the ledgestone bed, we plan to build it up a lot more. We are (finally) in a stage of removing old, overgrown, not-terribly-interesting shrubs from various areas of the yard (gaining in each step an area equivalent to that of a modern subdivision back yard!), so I would not be surprised if there is not opportunity to extend this tufa bed soon, as well. (I'd like to continue to build onto the backside of it... to even out those gap-toothed peaks a bit!)
I've been thinking of doing this for a while and have at last found a source of tufa but haven't yet plucked up courage to go ahead (there is always so much else to do!). Finding this thread is quite an inspiration! Unfortunately I can't get hold of really large boulders which would be most dramatic. There are not too many gardeners in the UK using tufa in such a way and the latest and very effective 'fashion' is the crevice garden. Of course I would like to have both, in addition to sand beds!! A lot of construction in the offing!
Tim: Why not have a tufa bed built as a crevice garden using sand as the underlying material After years of experimentation that is how I build all my tufa beds now. Some plants like a longer root run so they are planted in the crevices between the tufa. I plant Saxes directly in the tufa. I have found that in our climate, sand is the best material to build with tufa as sand is well-drained and essentially weed free. In the last tufa bed I constructed I incorporated a small diameter soaker hose at the base of the sand and it seems to work well to draw the roots of plants down deeper. Otherwise I have found shallower rooted plants in a sand bed can suffer from lack of water in a dry summer even with surface sprinkling.
Well, if all goes according to schedule, Phase II III of our tufa garden begins on Friday, with the delivery of materials... 4500 pounds of tufa, 10 bags of 1/2\" tufa gravel, 5 bags of tufa sand, 2 yards of 7mm gyra rock, and a yard of topsoil (for contouring the subsurface). (If more material is needed, it'll be acquired on an \"as-needed\" basis. We'll see how this amount works out.) I'll be trying to correct my beginner's errors of the first phase... better drainage, specifically. Stay tuned... !
There will be another slightly-lower mound to the right of the new one, to be put in place today, with a path in between. The big path to the back gate is to the right of that. There is more tufa laid out elsewhere in the yard. (Actually, it turns out that we bought 7500 pounds of tufa, rather than the ordered 4500 lbs... it was available on the truck, and not spoken for, as it turned out, so... :o)
Lori, I've found this to be true also. We almost always seem to have a period of extended drought during the summer now. I plant between pieces of tufa for a deep root run and have found that plants will also put roots into the tufa. Another way is to drill a hole right through the tufa. Some roots will extend into the sand beneath and other roots will still go inot the tufa. There is very little I plant directly into the tufa anymore - the garden is too big to water, and during extended drought, the water isn't available from our well.
Thanks, Anne. I am using a mix of tufa sand and gyra rock (7mm rounded gravel) as the planting medium this time... plus a little peat. I have been using these beds more as a tufa crevice garden to date, as you suggest, with plants stuck in between the tufa pieces. There are also some plantings into crevices in the pieces of tufa plus into some drilled holes in the tufa (for mainly saxifrages). Back to work now... :) 59ce067264