Quikrete® is the designer concrete blend.
The company makes everything concrete from A-Z. The linked website www.quikrete.com will prove it.
My interest in Quikrete® began when I bought and installed 150 12″ x 12″ x 1″ white concrete pavers. I laid those down on the wet side of my house. The rains haven’t come yet so I’m curious about how well they perform when that side of the Garden House fills up with slowly draining rainwater. Last weekend, I began figuring out the east side of the house. It is drier.
Wood seems to fit to that side. Pulling out all the spare wood I stored in my garage, I started playing around with them in terms of layout. The lengthwise are too long and the sidewise are too predictable. I wanted this side of the house to have an unusual organic feel. There are so many new growths from after the February big tree trim that I want to honor those babies. Mostly the Simpson Stoppers started growing from root shoots from the main tree I planted 18 years ago.
Wood is lovely but a friend reminded me that termites also love wood. So I will raise the wood off the earth by concrete. That’s when I thought of Quikrete®. The idea of laying organic, amorphous flagstones appealed to the organic quality I was hoping to achieve.
After some research and even watching a video, I bought two 50 lbs. bags of the red Quikrete®.
Please note that when you shop for Quikrete®, tap the bag hard to make sure the store’s moisture didn’t seep in and begin the hardening process. I found that most of the bags in my local Lowe’s were too hard. Instead, I bought 2 bags that had some product seepage from the bag’s upper folded over flap.
Pouring the dry Quikrete® onto brown kraft paper, I took out the hose and wet everything.
Twenty minutes later, it was hard. It was hard enough to walk on! I was congratulating myself with a winning mix. Twenty minutes after that, my organically laid out experiment broke. My intuition on how to set Quikrete® ran into a concrete wall…basically what I now have is the concrete equivalent of hard oatmeal cookies. A little too hard to eat and miserable to step on.