1st section of first course completed (yeah this is srsly gonna take forever) - Vacation looms

So I completed the first course for the first 10' of wall. Counting yesterday (when I started on the first course), I'd say I put in a good 3 hours of actual work w/ the stone, not to mention the preparation. Lesson to be learned: I have to get faster, but not at the expense of the quality of the work.

This evening I did manage to get faster/more efficient than I was yesterday. I made an executive decision based on some advice from two frequenters of Britain's Dry Stone Walling Association forums. (Dave from SW Ireland and Tracey from Yorkshire.) http://www.dswa.org.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=339.

I decided that I would try to find rocks that were roughly the same thickness, but I wouldn't waste time picking through the pile for a very particular thickness and shape of rock if I couldn't immediately find it. If I did that every time, I would always be looking for the perfect rock, and at some point all I would have left would be shitty-ass rocks. So I decided to just make the choice-of-rock decisions fast and work with what I have.

So though I will work in courses (as is the tradition here in Kentucky w/ most rock fences), at times the courses may come to resemble a random rubble wall. The courses are going to vary in height along the way, but I'll lay one course and then pack it, lay the next, pack that, until I get halfway up in height, where I will level off the courses at 15'' above the foundation and place the through (tie) rocks. Then I'll return to the random height courses until I level it out just below the cover stones. Luckily I have plenty of very flat nice cover stones (I dug them out of the creek bed. I'll get some pictures of these stone anomalies.) Then I'll do the coping. But to hell w/ the coping right now. That's a long way off.

So...pictures!

These three pictures are of the 1st course before I packed it:



This is after I packed the 1st course (I worked until after the sun set, so I'll get a clearer picture in the morning):


Also, I finally scanned in a rough copy of the schematics of the garden. The actual wall part of the drawing isn't done in much detail and it's not done to scale either. However, most everything else is done roughly to scale (the length and width of the wall have been increased to about 2 feet past the numbers indicated.) More explanation below the picture...



Inside the wall, most all of those dividing lines indicate raised beds for different vegetables. The raised beds will be demarcated by small stone retaining walls about 6'' to 10'' in height and about 6'' thick. If you look closely, you can see what I'm planning on planting where. The middle is going to be an open space, and the surrounding retaining walls will reflect that it is a circle by the curvature of the walls. In that open space I'm going to pave it with small stones and hopefully put a cool pattern in it.

But unfortunately the project will have to be on hold for about 8 days (Tomorrow until the 23rd of August.) Vacation w/ the in-laws.