Yeah, what I am addressing here is rain water. I have gutters that function correctly, but there is still a lot of water hitting my 2 story house that drips down the side and towards the ground below. In addition to that, the area under the deck that wraps around that entire side of the house is lower than the surrounding areas. Any water hitting my deck has the potential to drip towads the house and absorb into the area against the foundation. My first goal was to fix the grading immediately next to the house, and thus the question. I'm ultimately going to have to pull up a lot of the deck and level off the topsoil in that entire area. I hate to do it, because a lot of the screws are recessed at this point and there will be some damage to the deck I just spent a few hundred hours sanding down and refinishing last summer. I also have no sprinkler system or any kind of water leaks around the house. Our lot gets a lot of subsuface drainage from the adjouning areas, which is nothing I can really fix. What I am trying to do is minimize the amount of water coming into the drain tiles when it rains. Just wanted to clear those things up. As suggested, I'm going to try to get as much rock out as possible (its only a surface layer of maybe 3") and fill it with soil to the appropriate grade. After that, I'm going to cover it with a landscaping tarp going out about 10' from the house and directing water to the natural drainage paths per the suggestion of a village engineer. Thanks!

Hank, I do remember the heat wave of 1980 although I was living in Texas at the time. It was the worst summer ever and I know that I will never forget it. I was in college and working full-time, and I had a car with NO air conditioner. (That was the absolute last car I ever bought without an air conditioner!) My dad had a garden that year, as always, and all I remember about it is that he had a HUGE crop of the biggest, tastiest tomatoes we'd ever produced until the red spider mites got the plants in early August. In Fort Worth we went 69 days between June 23 and September 6 with high temperatures over 100 degrees, a record which stands to this day. We also recorded the all-time highest temperature ever officially recorded in the D-FW area on June 26 and June 27---113 degrees. That same year the second highest temperature ever recorded in Texas was recorded in Wichita Falls--119 degrees. In Oklahoma City, y'all had 50 days of triple digit high temperatures and recorded OKC's all-time high temp of 110 degrees--the hottest day on record outside of the Dust Bowl days. The Heat Wave of June-Sept. 1980 did an estimated $20 billion in damages/costs to agriculture and related industries. In addition, an estimated 10,000 deaths during that time-frame were classified as heat-related deaths including those caused by heat-related stress. I worked for an international airline and I remember that people would walk off the air-conditioned aircraft into the UNAIRCONDITIONED jetways, which were said to be in excess of 140 degrees, and they would collapse right there in the jetway. It happened over and over again. We sure kept the police officers, paramedics and firefighters busy that summer with all the medical calls. I also remember that you just couldn't seem to cool off, no matter what you did, because the nights were so incredibly warm too. I have been thinking along the same lines as you that we ought to have good gardening weather next year. For as long as I can remember, we have often had several hot and dry years in a row, but I don't ever remember having two excessively wet years in a row.....well, maybe in the late 1960s, but I was a kid then, so am not sure the memory is accurate. Dawn

I am not anti-rock. There are a lot of variables, koffman, such as the heat density of the rock the transfer qualities, size etc.. As far as pushing through the rock, that is handled by keeping the rock away from the crown of the hosta. Since you are in 7b this would be a decent zone for growing hosta. Adding rock, depending on how much sunshine the rock will get and your exact conditions, elevation, size of the rock, material of the rock, etc. you would increase your 'zone' slightly or maybe a one half zone (????). I like rock, big rocks, I don't like it as a mulch. However, personal preferences aside, Rocks are an incremental increase in your 'zone'. Will it slip you from 7b to an 8a? Perhaps if you are close to the line. In any event in your location I would look at any increase in heat as a negative for growing hosta. The more rock, the bigger the rock, the greater the heat coefficient the greater the solar heat gain. In cold climates using rock would extend the season, maybe extremely slightly, maybe noticeably; only a real life test would tell. Passive solar using stone or concrete to store solar heat in homes is very effective and was even used by the Anasazi Indians thousands of years ago who carved out their homes in cliffs facing South and such that the sun shone in to heat the dwelling when the sun was low in the winter and the dwelling was shaded when the sun was high in the summer. I wouldn't worry about pips getting through as long as you don't cover them with heavy rock. I have had hosta that,over many years, grew through landscaping fabric and squeezed the fabric into a solid block of plastic with the hosta eyes growing and thriving through the holes they poked through. Unbelievable!!! If you like a rock bed and are willing to trade off less optimum growing conditions for the hosta, then that is a personal choice that no one can say is right or wrong. In any event rocks can be removed, albeit not easily in many cases. Jon PS, a few years ago I watched as a contractor used a wet/dry vac to vacuum up pea stone behind a rock wall. The stone was for drainage behind the wall, however it kept falling into the hole as the contractor was digging it out for a deck footing. If removing the stone you may put in and eventually get tired of becomes necessary this might be a good trick to remember. OK, I have shared enough of my ramblings and potentially useless thoughts.....for now.

Hi Beth, I'm getting ready (trying to!) to leave on a trip pretty soon, and also getting ready for the spring swap right now, so I don't have much time to post, but this real quick! When I moved into this house everything that wasn't "grass" was covered with landscape fabric and a "decorative" rock called butter rock! I don't think it had been in for more than a couple years, possibly three, but I'm sure no more than that. In the back yard--where I do 99% of my gardening, there were 3 or 4 struggling perennials in the mass of rock. I've gardened for about 70 years as of right now--gardened "for real" for about 65!--so before I even signed the contract to buy the place I knew the ROCK had to go! And I didn't know the half of it till I started to take it all out. Rock is obviously incredibly heavy--and absolutely impossible to "shovel" once it "settled in." (River rock might be slightly easier, being "rounded.") I dug it out little by little with a hand trowel, putting it in larger black pots, and then putting it, little by little each week, in the dumpster--to keep it from getting too heavy! And I started "piling it up" on one end of the bed 'cause "disposing of it" was taking WAY too long since I wanted to start planting things. But the REAL problem started when I got down to the landscape fabric! As I started to pull the stuff out--a FAR more difficult job than I expected it to be!--I found some of the worst horribly compacted and DEAD soil I have ever seen! Parts of it were badly "discolored" with what I assume was some sort of a fungus/mold, and there were NO earthworms in it--at all! Worms are a sign of healthy soil! The "soil" was mostly heavy clay and that didn't surprise me because they clearly had filled in the area with "whatever was available" when they put it in! And in addition to all of that--I DID find "life" under the stuff! There were HUGE cities of ants that had set up housekeeping under the landscape fabric! Over the last 10 years I've gotten rid of most of them, but there are still a few places where I fight with them every year. By now you can really tell how much I love landscape fabric and ROCK! Eventually I posted FREE rock on FreeCycle and got somebody to come and take the (large!) "pile" I wound up with in the one corner. It was about four years before I finally got the entire bed across the back of my lot free of rock and fabric! As I cleared it out I started planting the cleared areas, so I didn't wait that long to "have a garden!" No way I could afford to "replace" the soil so I started out using cheap bagged "compost." It didn't do much, but maybe helped a little bit. I was surprised to find that some of the perennials did better in the clay than I ever thought they could--but I still don't recommend planting in heavy clay--if you have a choice! The very first year I started a compost pile and now have really Good Stuff to mix in as I'm planting and replanting--and over the years the soil is finally starting to improve enough to be "usable"--and with the introduction of homemade compost the worms are moving back in and increase every year. Another problem with having all the rocks in there is that they eventually get mixed into the soil––even where there's landscape fabric, and it's extremely difficult to "dig" in soil that has rocks in it. Every time you "hit" a rock you have to "move the shovel around" to get "past" it before you can dig in any deeper--so rocks seem to cause all kinds of "problems!" So! If you decide to keep the rock, I guess my best recommendation would be to clear out--as in, remove the rock and fabric--a "fairly large" area in a few places where you want to put perennials or bushes and just plan to not have a "wall to wall" flower bed. For the sunny areas you could put some pretty basic perennials in like Shasta daisies, Black-eyed-Susans, German Iris, Daylilies, or a few other "easy to grow" things. After a few years they'd spread to fill in the entire area where you removed the rock/fabric, so you'd have "color" out there and it wouldn't all just look like "rock!" Think about what you want to do! You have plenty of time to plan it and work on it! You might want to try clearing out one fairly large spot somewhere and plant a few things to "see how it goes" with the dog. Possibly, depending on the dog, you could use some of the "short" garden edging type fence to keep her/him out. Just consider the different possibilities. I use "small bark mulch" but there's also a kind of "shredded" wood mulch you can buy, and I kind of doubt that a dog would want to chew on that stuff too much, so you might try different kinds of things to see if you can find something that works better than rock for you. [But! In the last several years "somebody" has decided that cubing up old tires and calling it MULCH is a good idea! Please, please-please-please don't put any "old tire mulch" in your yard! Decaying/deteriorating rubber would be an even worse thing to have in your soil than rocks--or you could just name your garden the Decaying Petroleum Garden! Ahh! What a fine scent! ;-D] Think about it and take your time in planning and maybe trying some different ideas in some areas. You'll eventually get to what you really want and like! I probably won't be back for a while with any "long" answers--just not gonna have enough time for the next month or so, but there are lots of other folks around here to give you ideas! Skybird EDITED TO ADD: When you start a thread I don't believe you can edit the "topic" at all once it's posted, and I'm pretty sure you can only edit the text of the first post for something like an hour and after that it's "set in stone"--so to speak!!! Replies to the original post can be edited for a month or something like that!