Post #81982 by pariartspaul on Sun, Mar 21, 2004 8:56 AM

Does anyone have any pictures and advice on homemade backyard rockwork?

Richard and I are right in the middle of creating some fake lava rock raised planters and other things for the backyard. Does anyone have experience with what type concrete mixtures work best?

We're creating the shapes by taking metal lathe and sculpting it around all kinds of junk we've got, like old concrete blocks and pieces of old metal junk.

We've found the most difficult part is getting the cement to stick well to the verticle surfaces, it just falls off or slides through the lathe. We tried a mix of one bag of regular cheap concrete to one bag of regular stucco with about a bucket of peat moss thrown in makes it stick better - it thickens it up quite a bit and it's more like clay. It seems to be hardening okay, but it's taking like a week for it harden up really good as opposed to straight concrete that hardens up over night. Next we're going to try adding some mortar to it.

For the texture, we tried the rock salt idea and also the crushed ice cubes mentioned in a post here. The ice cubes kind of mushed up the surface and didn't work out too well. The rock salt worked pretty well, but the detail is very small. We're finding that making the lava holes with little sticks of different sizes works pretty good, gives a more theatrical lava rock kind of look, more like old fashioned fake rock like old Adventureland or something. Looks cool.

We stuck some seashells in here and there also. I think for color, we're going to try just spraying on some black paint, probably exterior latex. Any advice on color?

We'd love to see some pictures of what anyone else has done or any tips to give us inspiration!

Mahalo!