Garden beds

This past Labor Day weekend we decided to be laborious and landscape our garden beds.  The garden beds were already in place when we moved in, but they were bordered with some ugly 4x4s which were also rotting.

Before we started I built a contraption to keep my tomato plants inside the beds.  This involved some long molding that we removed from a bathroom a while back, some chicken wire, a sawzall and a staple gun.  Charlie was supervising since he remembers what happened last time I used a staple gun.

We placed an order with Menards for 100 retaining wall bricks, 50 caps, 25 flat pavers, 25 bags of paver base, 2 bags of interlocking paving sand and 15 bags of mulch.  It all arrived on Friday afternoon just in time for the weekend.

We were also adding some flat paver stones in between the beds.  So first up, we needed to remove the lovely bricks I laid down when I first moved in.

Then Jamie & Jake dug up the grass and dirt between the beds and I hauled it off.  Unfortunately there was a big storm that came through that morning making the dirt very heavy.

Next up was adding the paver base.  Jamie overestimated how deep the hole needed to be and Jamie ended up going to the local True Value for 12 more bags of paver base. 

The next morning Jake was ready to go!  I just had to convince him to get out of his pjs.

Jamie rented a compactor and compacted the paver base before laying the flat paver stones.  It turned out that we needed 9 more flat paver stones, so I jumped in the car and headed back to Menards.

The paver stones were in so next up was the retaining walls around the beds.  It took us about an hour before we realized we needed more paver base, so this time I went to True Value for 8 more bags.

That day we finished the longest retaining wall in the front of the house and I continued into the dark getting the ground ready for the next two smaller beds. That day I had also put down mulch in the big flat beds towards the street but I quickly realized I didn’t order near enough mulch and Jamie also realized we were going to need more bricks and caps for the retaining walls.  So, the next morning we gathered all our bricks and figured out how many more we needed and then I went back to Menards again for 9 more bricks, 7 more caps and 14 more bags of mulch.

Jake was promoted to Supervisor that day until Grandma came and took him to her house.  Let’s just say that Jake was not a fan of our landscaping plans by the third day.

We worked all day and finished the job by 5pm.  While the weather was hot, humid and rainy the first day we couldn’t have asked for better weather on the second and third day.  It was strenuous, long and tiring, but in the end it looks so much better!