Gravel « Tsubo-en Zen-garden diary

Front-garden gravel-area restoration

At the time we initially constructed our garden we used a couple of hundred square meters of weed control fabric (barrier cloth) as a basis for the gravel area's, in particular the Ginshanada. When that was almost finished we walked into just a minor shortage of barrier cloth, to finish the gravel area to [...]

Tidy-up the Ginshanada ocean or gravel-sea

After the winter period the gravel area’s need a rigorous tidy-up. Rather then duplicating these activities I will point you to last years activity. Some of the aspects we need to take care of are : Algae an mosses growing on and in the gravel. This may involve just […]

The Ginshanada and Island edges, a coastline

The Ginshanada or ‘silver sand open sea’ coastline is in most places the intersection of the gravel area with the Tsukiyama “land-area” that can be found in the front-garden and in the main-garden compartment (also see: my post ‘Tsukiyama, the edges in the front-garden’) and the coastline of islands, like the […]

Maintaining ‘the five Islands of immortality’ gravel ‘sea’

After Trimming ‘the five Islands of immortality’ topiary box, the ‘sea’ in which they float needs a tidy-up. Not only do we need to clean it from any leafs and debris left after trimming, we also remove weeds and mosses. Then we need to flatten the gravel area. Sometimes the soil has worked its […]

Raking the Ginshanada, flat and level

A frequently recurring job is raking the gravel area’s, the largest one being the Ginshanada. Basically there are two distinct forms of raking: Flat and level. Patterns. Even if we rake a pattern, the surface still needs to get raked flat and level. For this we use, you already guessed, the flat side of the […]