We recently ordered five cubic yards of one-inch red cinder. It’s a heapin’ pile o’ rock and it looks like this:

Good thing we have a big, wide concrete pad for it to sit on! You can see some staining on the gray concrete. I think we’ll get a trippy tie-dye effect of red swirls and smears left behind when the heap’s gone. That’s fine by me, the concrete could use a little color.

I shovel a dozen shovelfuls into the wheelbarrow and it gets about half-full at best. I reckon that’s about five-plus gallons of rock. I move a dozen wheelbarrow loads and then I quit for the day. And I only do it every few days, not every day. Hey, I’m a senior citizen! I shouldn’t be expected to work so hard.

It turns out that five cubic yards is 1010 gallons! (I learned this from Wolfram Alpha.) But that’s not exact. One fluid US gallon is defined as 231 cubic inches. A cubic yard is 3 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet (27 cubic feet) which, in inches, is 36 x 36 x 36 or 46,656 cubic inches. If you have five of those that’s 233,280 cubic inches. If you divide that number by 231 you get 1009.801298 . . . and a heapin’ mess o’ more digits.

So, rounding off to 1010 is the way to go. After all, who actually measured the five cubic yards? That’s got to be, as my old Chem 1A prof would say, “a quick-and-dirty number.” I suspect they really sell the stuff by weight, anyway.

But that’s not the point. Once I realized that I scooped about five-plus gallons or so into the wheelbarrow for each load, I knew it would only take about 200 loads to finish the job. I’ve already logged a few dozen, so this is a task even I can complete.

We like to xeriscape. That’s from a Greek word xeros which means dry. It was coined by a woman named Nancy Leavitt in 1981. Rocks grow just great around here! They need to have new buddies join them every decade or so, but are otherwise very low maintenance. I recommend you get your own heap real soon.