[Music] oh hello and welcome to english gardening with the hacksman today i'll be showing you how to create these faux landscaping stones and by fair of course i mean they're fake guys i got a conundrum i've got these wood chips around the house and they meet up with the grass sometimes they meet up with the lack thereof grass but it's a messy edge and i've looked at different types of pavers and stuff and i just don't like the hard edge and the way it looks and so i saw this hack online and you know i'm something of a hack myself and i thought i'm going to give that a try but first let's go back 24 hours and do some testing cheap drop cloth [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] i don't know we'll see [Music] [Music] oh this is way messed up this ain't gonna be no good [Applause] let's see our test came out first off is just the concrete piles that i made this one i went over with a trowel to try to smooth it over a little bit and it got better than the other two but as you can see basically what these look like is a clump of concrete so i'm going to call these a definite fail let's go to the first one these are actually these are still warm this one was the heavy rock salt one i mean it does look better than this one over here you can see it's smoother but you know i'm guessing this could be a couple of different things this could be the rock salt that caused this bumpiness but also whenever i pulled these up when i pulled the plastic up to make the bag and there's air on the bottom so then whenever i flipped it over the air went to the top and lifted the bag off of the concrete and i think that that could be what's causing that let's check the let's go on down the line and see what we come up with this one had the light rock salt in it they're basically the same this one had no rock no rock salt on it okay so we're getting there we're getting better last one this is the where i did the concrete and then mix some black color into the concrete hey all right so this one i really that's pretty wild looking i don't know if i like that colorization on there now the only thing is i got to figure out how many of these i need and i think it's going to be quite a few so after some quick measurements and using my superior skills of deduction i have deduced deduced is that i have to do anyway i need about 140 of these rocks so uh let's get cracking one thing to keep in mind whenever you're making concrete is that the more water you add to cement the weaker uh the final concrete product will be for this whole 50 pound bag they say it only add about 1.9 liters of water to it so you want it to be fairly dry normally but in this case i actually want this to be kind of loose and the reason is because because it is fast setting this stuff is setting up like don't mix a whole bag of this and try to do this at one time if you use the fast setting i'm only doing maybe a bag to three quarters of a bag and i'm almost running out of time before it starts to set up so that's why i'm just making it a little bit looser and i don't really need strength for this anyway this is purely for looks so this will be fine for this project this is why you don't want your mix to be too dry because when you pull it out of the bag you're going to have these cracks all in it now what i'm going to do is actually just take some of the concrete that's left over here that i haven't put in a bag yet and i'm going to smear it over those cracks because if there's one thing you don't want showing it's your crack [Applause] oh no okay so right here you try not to crack in [Music] now this is kind of a lengthy and tedious project for me and whenever i've got something like that i like to ask myself what would a socially conscious shoe company do and that's right i come to the conclusion have the women and children do it all right oh oh wait let me see let me see i got a rock yeah so these don't have any because i ran out of pam i ran out of it and i was like you know what the test ones seem to do okay without it so none of these have oil on them so it just makes it go even faster and easier anyway it goes a lot faster pardon the interruption it has recently come to my attention that some of you may not have hit the like button or the subscribe button please do it now have you done it okay back to the regular scheduled program to the garden we go come children do drop for fake uh [Music] [Applause] [Music] once you get all the rocks down be sure to water them it'll help them grow oh oh yeah and don't make fun of my sparsely grassed area here in the garden okay i've been trying i've been working hard on this and i put a bunch of seed in here and it's not growing so in an upcoming video i'm going to resolve this issue when i first saw this on the internet i thought that's just dumb enough it might work and lo and behold it does and i'm actually really thrilled with this i know kim's happy with it it really gives the cottagey look that kim wanted for this little kind of secret garden why did i do that on garden anyway it's her little secret garden back here for her and my mom so it gave us the perfect look we like and it was easy to do but let's talk dollars and cents first off as we all know i ain't got no sense so let's move on to dollars dollars this cost me about 60 bucks to do this whole project because it took 11 bags at you know about 550 a bag that's 140 of these stones that i did that did this whole project so 60 dollars and that comes up to about 43 cent a stone now if you go and you do a quick search on the internet to buy a bunch of these stones okay if you buy real ones they're gonna end up costing you anywhere from i mean i couldn't find them this low but let's just say four dollars to more like eight dollars of stone so you're talking about saving you know oh i don't know a thousand bucks to do this project time wise we had about five hours in this project and you got to remember it takes me a little bit longer because i'm trying to film everything and you know but this job is so simple that a child can do it because clearly my children did help out on this project and we all enjoy doing it let's talk about some tips that i want to let you know about i've just realized that i lied to you in fact the cost on this project was not 60 bucks but more like 70 bucks because i did pay 10 for this pack of drop cloths which brings me to our first tip and that is these are a half mil thick and you may want to get slightly thicker these actually worked fine for i would say 97 percent of the stones but if we put too much in we could tear these now the way to prevent that is these tips okay whenever you're making the bag don't turn it too tight don't twist it too tight because you'll push the air through and you'll pop the back and you'll blow a hole in it okay the other tip is don't drag that you know don't don't drag that don't drag them across the table because you're going to have concrete on there and you're g
