Making a natural style Japanese garden (part 2)
From this chapter, I am going to write the way how to make a natural style Japanese garden. (If you haven’t read part 1 yet, please see my previous episode.)
This time, I proceed 5 steps as follows;
- making a car parking lot
- making a garden path
- build a wooden fence
- Soil improvement
- Planting
First, I brought a backhoe to get rid of all the rubbles underneath of the soil. The person who operated it was Shiono-san, we used to work together at the company making tea garden in the past. He came all the way from the Saitama to help my work.
While making the surface smooth, he was also digging a hole for the space of the future car parking lot. Usually, when we are making a parking space, we put around 10cm gravel on the soil to make the surface durable. Since I planned to put railway sleepers and Oya tuff stone at the parking and they have around 15cm hight, we need to dig 25cm at this time.
After finished backhoe work, I and Shiono-san started to put gravel on the parking space.
Then next step was to arrange sleepers and stones. Before installing them, we put mortar to make gravel surface flat. This time, Alba (from UK) and Kitani-san (Japanese photographer) came to help my work. At time moment, they were trying to make the surface smooth.
Even though this stone was more than 70kg, and the sleeper was 60kg, we need to carry all of them by hand since this road is too narrow to park a crane truck. As may you already know, Japanese minitruck(we called it Kei-truck) is so small, and we can go anywhere even in the Japanese small streets.
In order to make the entrance part for the car, we broke the concrete block and also arranged boundary stones between road and garden space.
The stonework is really tiring but the result is beautiful.
I am going to write about the garden path next time.
See you soon!
