Almost all plants in an Alpine garden needs a slope. Usually rocks are used to support the slope. Drainage is paramount, no matter how you achieve it. Adding sand to good loam or clay and you get stucco if you have no slope and it retains water. Free draining is the key. Build your berm as high as you are able. Some alpine plants prefer limestone based soil and some prefer acid. Some don't care what the ph is. I smear mud on rocks, plop some sedums on it, and walk away. You can arrange the rocks as in a rock outcropping, dump gravel between them , squeeze a few plant in, and watch things grow. An alpine garden does not need plants wall to wall. Mike This next picture isn't meant to look good, but to show how sedums and succulents can be grown in even the most adverse conditions. Here they are growing on wood and rocks with just a minimum amount of soil. Friends come by and add or subtract stuff all the time. I'm not in charge. lol Ignore the telephone booth. It's a joke. I'm still trying to find an appropriate place for it. Mike Here's another part of the garden that looks a little alpine. It needs a major makeover as I haven't touched it in about two years. Time constraints, you know. I have done nothing to the soil except give it a slope. It's good loam on the acid side. Mike...on vacation

lmao Kristy, hope the brainwashing sticks!! Sh!t I'd have been scared if I were him too! Glad it went well, and praying it's not anything serious! I'm feelin a lil better, thank you..guess its just a virus. Seems to be goin around, DH took 2 days off work from it, son was home Tuesday from it. Worst part is the headache and feelin pukey..pukie...how DO you spell that lol. Headache is so bad it's affecting my vision. I'm used to migraines, but this is a doozey. I'll live. nothin compared to what some of us on here are goin through. So I won't whine about it :) O hey..bad news. I went through my dahlias today, and they were ALL moldy :( Sux. I'm sorry I wont be able to send you any. I dont think I can afford to buy them this year. But if I do happen to get lucky and get some, I will send you a couple as I had promised! I guess the basemnt stairwell isnt a good place to keep them, live & learn. Daniella

TexasRanger, I doubt the nematodes are a serious problem for ornamental plants, especially the native types you grow, but they are for many agricultural plants and I know lcdollar is growing an edible garden, so that's why I mentioned nematodes. The folks to my south who have deep sand (roughly 280' deep) in the Thackerville area have gorgeous ornamentals because they grow the types of plants (mostly natives or at least cultivated ornamentals that were bred from natives) that grow well in sand. They also can grow some vegetables (particularly melons and southern peas) that like the sand. Their sand is not the sandy loam found in much of Oklahoma, it is deep river sand that looks almost like beach sand. I am just a few miles north of Thackerville and don't have that deep river sand. In our areas with sand, we have a light brown sandy loam that is heavy on sand and silt, and short on loam, but it isn't at all that beachy sand like Thackerville has. We call their sand "sugar sand" to distinguish it from regular sandy loam type soils found in much of Oklahoma. If someone is trying to grow the wrong kinds of plants (by wrong, I mean not well-adapted to fast-draining sand) in that deep sugar sand, they are in trouble. My friends who have attempted to grow tomatoes and peppers in deep sugar sand have had to wage protracted, unwinnable wars with root-knot nematodes. I always tease them and tell them they need to truck in some clay to mix with their sand, although I doubt anyone really would want to buy clay soil on purpose. I think your landscape is beautiful and it works for you and fits the architectural style of your home so well. I am sorry if you catch a lot of grief from folks who are adamantly opposed to adding sand. I think you're right on track when you say that a lot of sand must be added. I think most people with dense, slow-draining clay add far too little sand and it does give them even worse soil than the clay they had before because often clay + sand = adobe. Well, for true adobe, I guess they'd have to add straw. I also think that sugar sand works better for edible gardeners when lots of compost is added at the same time because edible plants tend to need the nutrition from the compost and also need soil that drains well but not too well since many vegetable and fruit plants need lots of moisture available consistently in their root zones in order to produce good fruits and vegetables. The first thing I did to improve the very dense red clay around our house was buy one dumptruck load of sand our very first year here. They told us it was topsoil, but it was the worst sugar sand I've ever seen, and I didn't even care, because our clay wasn't going to grow anything we wanted to grow until we did something to fix it. We couldn't really rototill it into the clay because the clay was so dense that even a powerful rear-tine tiller just bounced around on top of the ground, so then we spread hay and straw a foot deep on top of the sand once we had hauled the sand around one wheelbarrow load at a time and raked it out smooth. Since we have strongly sloping property, we wanted to keep the sand from eroding away. Once we had been here 3 or 4 years, we rototilled the sand and compost (the remains of that foot of hay and straw) into the clay and it got a lot better, but since then, the only improvement the lawn area around the house has gotten has been compost layered on top of the ground occasionally. We still get sand occasionally (but not because we buy a a truck load of it) when it erodes during heavy rainfall from the property directly south of us which still has some sand left, although their sand is slowly becoming our sand with each heavy rainfall. I don't mind their sandy loam washing onto our land---it isn't filled with nematodes because it is on top of clay subsoil---but we got up to 4" of sand washed into our garden in a very heavy rainstorm (12.89" in one day) in April 2009 and my whole garden, including several inches of mulch, was buried under wet sand. There wasn't much I could do about it then, but in the fall and winter, I just rototilled all that sand and the mulch that was underneath it, into the garden soil. While it was frustrating that year to have all that weed seed-filled sand on top of the mulch, it didn't harm the garden too much (though the excess moisture made plant growth stall for a couple of months), but I still have a lot more weed issues in the area that got the 4" of sand so I'm still pulling out those weeds every year when they sprout. Oh, and oddly, the ranch right across the street to our east has a lot of that sugar sand, but the only place we have sugar sand is in our creek bed.....because it washes there from the ranch across the road. We have a new back garden (new as of a couple of years ago) about 100-120' west of our house that has native sandy-silty loam in about 70% of the area and I like it, but the voles like it as well, so I am having to be careful with what I plant there because the voles devour the roots of everything. I barely saved my Texas lantana from them by digging it up, putting it in a very large container and pruning back the topgrowth very hard to match the root pruning the hungry voles had done. So far, there isn't much the voles won't eat in that back garden's sandy soil, so it is frustrating to plant back there and watch everything die. They eat fruit tree roots, including native persimmons that popped up in that area on their own after we rototilled it, conflower roots, the fig tree roots, etc. Since we have 10+ acres of wooded land filled with pine voles, we'll never be rid of them, so I think the only way I'll be able to use the new back garden for anything permanent in nature will be to make root cages with 1/4" hardware cloth and plant the root balls within the wire cages. Every year the voles eventually, usually in July, start eating the roots of my annual flowers and veggies in that back garden, but usually I've gotten enough of a harvest from the veggies to feel fairly satisfied with the performance of that garden. I thought gardening in native sandy loam would be easier than amending clay endlessly, and it would be, if we didn't have a non-stop population of voles. An interesting note---in that first year when the voles began eating the roots of everything in the back garden, I frantically dug up everything I could and moved all the plants to the front garden, except for trees (fig and desert willow, which had almost no roots left so I put them in containers and they have recovered). I've never had nematodes in that front garden since it started out as clay, but there must have been nematodes on the roots of something that I dug up that year and moved to a specific raised bed in the front garden because last year one single tomato plant in that bed was covered in nematodes and I raise my own plants so those nematodes weren't brought in from the outside. I so far haven't had nematodes in the back garden as far as I know, but somehow they must have been on a plant I moved from the back to the front in the first Vole War. lcdollar, Your soil looks like brown clay. Black gumbo clay is as black as night. I love the way hugelkultur improves the land, but we have a woodland full of deadfall I can collect in winter and use. Most people here in our area clean up their woodlands and pastures and just burn the wood and brush, or they use prescribed burns out on the big ranchlands to accomplish the same thing. I just compost it or use it in limited hugelkulturs. I don't plant much in a hugelkultur that will need to be harvested for the first couple of years because we have so many snakes here near the Red RIver. I wait until it all has decomposed enough that the snakes cannot climb around freely in it. In our earliest years here, I just added big chunks of wood---burying them several inches below the soil surface in the veggie garden. They decomposed in no time at all....a year or two or three....depending on their size and improved the soil as much as anything else I've ever done. When I added big chunks of wood to my raised beds, the old rancher-old farmer crowd about stroked out and couldn't wait to tell me how big of an idiot I was and how wrong I was and how much I'd regret it. In this case, they were wrong and I've never regretted adding the wood. Yes, I know all about how it will tie up nitrogen as it decomposes, but I just added extra nitrogen to accomodate that, and I had this most lush, lovely, productive gardens ever. I still add wood whenever I can. All I have tried to do with my veggie garden is to turn the soil there into the same soil we have in our woodland areas---that woodland soil comes from decomposing trees, leaves and other plants as well as decomposing animals (wildlife does die, you know, and we don't go in there and bury them) and insects, etc. that fall to the ground and decompose in place. It is the most gorgeous soil, being "built", so to speak, from the top down over the last 50-70 years as the trees grew along the creek and the farmer quit farming that area, and then the woodland expanded and expanded over the decades. If you dig down in the woodland, you find the same horrible red clay we have on most of our property, but it is beneath about a foot of woodland soil. I hope someday that my veggie garden soil is as loamy and rich and dark brownish-black as the woodland soil. It has improved a great deal, but still has a long way to go.

The width of the tile joint determines the grout type. Sanded grout holds better in joints, and unsanded is only used as a last resort as it has no body and will shrink and pull away when used in too large joints. Better still is the new grouts with the microfine aggregates that can go into the small joints or large. It isn’t your $8 a bag cheap box store crapola though. If you want to view your job from the viewpoint of industry standards, start here. This is the industry bible, with all of the standards laid out in black and white with diagrams. https://www.tcnatile.com/products-and-services/publications/218-english-publications/188-handbook/957-2018-tcna-handbook-for-ceramic-glass-and-stone-tile-installation.html But. You should have hired an installer who owns a copy and knows all of that. Did you follow these steps when hiring? https://www.ceramictilefoundation.org/homeowners-guide-to-hiring-qualified-tile-installer