How To Build A Raised Brick Garden Bed – Some of the most evocative scents of my childhood come from my grandmother’s garden on the Tyneside coast. Fragrant sweets, fruity marigolds and the unmistakable spicy aroma of tomato leaves mixed with kerosene in the greenhouse. We lived there every summer, and my job was to pick peas – piles and piles of them in the most delicious shades of pink, purple and white. Back in my parents’ garden in Yorkshire, I remember the powerful scent of the red, orange and yellow roses that my father grew, and the warm aroma of the rich soil of my little garden plot that I diligently tended, complete with a small round mirror for a pond and gravel border. We were a National Trust family and spent many happy weekends exploring the wonderful local gardens – Harlow Carr, Newby Hall and Harwick Hall. I especially loved the vegetable gardens, wandering through the raised beds and pretty privet hedges, imagining I was a grand lady of the manor (in reality, of course, she would have been, at best, a laundress!). Growing things is in my blood, but since having kids, the idea of having something else to tend to, even just a few seeds or supermarket herbs on the kitchen windowsill, has felt overwhelming.
When we demolished the back of the house, I instructed the builders to save all the old bricks and pile them up in the garden. We even kept the broken brick half and quarters on the basis that they “had some use” (the builders were a little skeptical about that last point). My plan was to build raised beds out of them – with just a few layers of bricks; enough to keep the plants in and the dogs out. If there are any bricks left over from this work, we will use them to complete the high wall at the end of the garden and build some paths.
How To Build A Raised Brick Garden Bed
These bricks sat on pallets in our garden, hidden behind several unattractive bushes, for over three years. During this time, our third daughter went without sleep for two years, I left one job and started a new one, we installed the new kitchen, decorated the entire first floor (including sanding and oiling all the floors), renovated the family bathroom, removed the paper wall of the hallway and landings and painted the yellowed and chipped wood, framed and hung dozens of precious photos and images acquired over the years.
Three Key Benefits Of Gardening In Raised Beds
Every time I went out into the garden I thought “I wish we had time to build those raised beds”. When I go out into the garden at least a thousand times a year, the absence of raised beds was a fairly frequent recurring thought. One of the main tricks to DIY home renovations with young children is to accept that the projects will take a long time to complete, and with some projects it can take years to start. Feeling frustrated about this is neither healthy nor helpful. Instead, it’s better to focus on doing your best to accept the horrible wallpaper, or the tired old woodwork, or the ugly piles of bricks in the garden, and wait for the day when your long-awaited project finally comes to fruition. .
Our theme for 2019 is “nurture,” which means growing plants, which means raised beds. With three rambunctious Jack Russells running around messing with everything, the common plant doesn’t stand a chance in our garden. Raised beds provide some protection from hairy legs (even Lady Penny gets in on the action). I decided to install the beds right in front of the deck, an unconventional move given my desire to stroll outside, casually cut some mint for my mojito and some peonies for my vase, and then return home without having to pass by. for her. . the mud in the rest of the garden (our drainage is not good, so the slightest rain turns the ground into a swamp). I also wanted to incorporate the structure of the raised beds into a fence that spanned the entire width of the garden (to keep dogs and their golden packs off the lawn) and thought that a fence broken up by some bricks and decorative wire would be less imposing than a gigantic series of strikes.
We’ve built four large beds in six months so far, one last fall and three this year, which by our standards is extremely quick.
We used the pointed bricks from our old bay window to make little rounded hexagonal corners on the beds.
How To Build A Raised Garden Bed: Step By Step Guide
There are plenty of professional guides out there for building brick raised beds, so I’ll just share a quick overview of how we tackle ours, simply to show that some amateurs can produce pretty solid results with a little time and effort. , rather than providing comprehensive step-by-step instructions.
I laid out the plan with bricks to figure out what size beds I wanted and what kind of spacing between each bed felt right.
I ended up changing the design to include four vertical beds with one horizontal at each end.
I used a laser level to line up the first bed with the deck, staked it with string, and then dug a perfect rectangle in the grass where I wanted to place the foundations. I filled this with a mixture of MOT and sharp sand (which we both put in the garden after the works) and leveled it along each side and from one side to the other using a decking board, level and hammer. When one side was higher than the other, I temporarily removed the MOT and sand mixture to dig a little deeper or added more MOT to increase the height.
How To Build Raised Beds From Reclaimed Bricks — Alice De Araujo
Level raised beds from one side to the other. Maybe a bit rudimentary approach 🙂 but good enough for our purposes.
Neither of us had tried masonry before, but we enjoyed experimenting, so that’s exactly what we did. We mixed our own mortar in a bucket with cement powder, sharp sand and water, and mixed it all with a special attachment for our drill.
I put some mortar on the base of the MOT, placed a brick on top, checked it with a spirit level and tapped it into place with the hammer. I then smeared the edge of another brick with more mortar, attached it to the first brick (still in the mortar bed), smoothed it again, and tapped it into place.
We used decking boards to keep the bricks straight while we put them in place. See also the dirty tennis ball and the avid ball chasers.
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It sounds very simple, and to some extent it was. We quickly got into the flow of things: I selected the bricks, greased them, leveled them, and tapped them into place, while my husband mixed the mortar and followed me cleaning the mortar and pointing the bricks (you can get tools for this, but with a thumb wrapped in a glove works great). Things that slowed us down: the bricks were different heights and different conditions, so it was time consuming to find suitable bricks from the piles in the garden; having to throw the ball to Enrique every ten seconds; three girls who wanted to help; is counted by; low light; cold weather (I’m only willing to lie in the cold for three hours before throwing in the towel, which, while a pretty solid time commitment, isn’t enough to complete a twin bed, especially considering all the speed-reducing factors ).
With four beds in place, it was time to fill them. I ordered a few tons of soil mixed with compost, which was delivered to the garage in bags by a guy with a remote-controlled crane. Then we swung him around the back and carefully threw him onto the beds. (Before that, I dug up the bottom of the beds and removed a lot of roots and rocks, with the help of my six-year-old son, who was under the impression that pirates lived in our house and therefore might have buried treasure in the garden. )
Looking for work with my faithful companion. It looks like I have a rabbit tail, but it’s actually caused by recently sitting in white oil-based paint 🙂
So far I’ve planted some long-awaited David Austin roses, along with peonies, sage, mint and thyme. I also have strawberry plants in pots, but they need a new bed construction for them as the cut flowers have taken over the entire room. I have carrots, kale, cosmos and sunflowers growing indoors from seeds, plus some dahlia tubers in pots. Meanwhile, my parents are growing cherry tomatoes and peas for us – and I’m thinking about planting some potatoes. I have no idea if I will succeed
Raised Garden Bed Ideas & Designs
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