Bruce and I lean toward the weird when it comes to finding materials for our home and property. I confess, I do like to push creativity to the outer limits, especially when dreaming up ways to build “green” or use conventional things in unconventional ways.
Just ask our architect friend, who’s never criticized (openly) any of my cracked-pot suggestions for things like mud-flap roof tiles and aluminum culvert columns and livestock watering trough bathtubs.
My hunch is I’m probably exactly the kind of homeowner CC&Rs had in mind when they were created.
When it came time to build Greenberg Acres out here in Igo, we went as environmentally friendly as possible. We have solar panels on our roof. We have a cork floor in our kitchen, bamboo floors nearly everywhere else and concrete floors in our bathroom.
We also spent more than a year visiting out-of-town salvage yards where we found, among other things, eight, 8-foot-tall salvage doors (50 bucks each) that we transformed into windows (when I say “we” I mean Bruce, my sons and nephew). And our screened porch is paneled entirely of reclaimed (free) redwood, saved and planed from a broken old Inwood redwood water tank .
Of the new things we did buy, most were steeply discounted because they were discontinued or returned to the store for some bizarre reason. (We saved thousands of dollars on our double ovens because their previous owner hated the noisy cooling fan.)
I love a bargain almost as much as I love common things used in uncommon ways.
That’s how we came to buy five crop circles. I found them last month as Bruce and I drove along Eastside Road in Redding. I practically screamed with joy and begged Bruce to turn the car around.
We drove into Cook Concrete Products where I couldn’t believe my eyes: a sea of 18-inch tall, 4-foot diameter concrete bottomless circles. Cook had lots of other concrete things, too.
But I was smitten with the circles.
I imagined how I could turn these concrete circles into crop circles, specifically, herb beds. The possibilities were endless: I could paint them. I could mosaic them. I could plaster them. I could cover them in rock. Heck, gray concrete is so pretty, especially as it ages. I could just leave the circles alone.
We bought five circles at about $90 each. Even with the $120 delivery fee, this was still a landscaping bargain.
Our anticipated happy delivery arrived this week when a Cook Concrete Products employee drove a flatbed truck loaded with our quintet of 900-pound herb gardens to our property. He used a remote control that operated the truck’s red dangling “spider” attached to a small crane. The crane effortlessly lifted each circle from the truck, then heaved them through the air with the greatest of ease. The guy was as graceful as a ballerina when it came to working that remote.
Amazingly, he’d never heard of someone using the circles as raised bed gardens. However, he did say his father-in-law bought a 12-inch-tall concrete circle for a barbecue pit. Brilliant!
Meanwhile, nothing’s growing in our crop circles yet.
But we are growing accustomed to open-mouthed stares from the locals who must wonder what the heck these country-living newbies are doing.
Hey, if they like our crop circles, just wait until they get a load my unorthodox ideas for septic tanks.
