As you saw in the Garden Tour post (and above), we now have rocks in the garden instead of the grass. It looks a million times better. Doug killed the grass and then covered everything with the black landscaping fabric. It took a lot of piecing together only because of the shape of the beds, but we have plenty left over for the back yard project this fall and next summer (more on that later!). He stapled it into the ground and then we ordered rocks from our local landscaping company.
Below is a view from our deck in the back yard. You can see everything is covered and ready for rocks!
Below shows that we didn't order enough rocks the first time! We ended up doing a 50/50 mix of small (pea size) and 1" creek gravel. It works well. I hope to eventually find some great stones for stepping stones but want them to be natural, not the square kind from a box store. Some day! I have three right now from when we bought the foundation stones.
It took Doug some time in shoveling and moving the gravel around the garden. We did the first half one day and the second half another day as this seemed to happen on some of the hottest days this summer.
If you notice, I went back after the rocks were down and added additional brick edging to all of the beds. I started adding one additional line of broken bricks to every bed and then still had some left over, so I went and did a third on the big, back bed. It allowed me to get all of our broken bricks out of the driveway. The extra full size bricks are now stepping stones but may be used elsewhere in the future. I was left with maybe 15 random bricks that had too much mortar left on them to use, so they will be put behind the dog house to keep a certain someone from digging to China.
I could write a book on what not to do with landscape cloth. When we first did our back area we used inexpensive cloth and in no time pin holes were letting weeds through. Five years later the whole thing has to be redone. We learned the hard way to invest in good quality cloth and to make sure to overlap it about three inches for weeds appear in the cracks.
ReplyDeleteYou have certainly done a lot of work here. I like the layout and think it will look great when complete.