Raised Garden

Our first garden project.

With the greenhouse installed, and lots of seedlings on the way, we thought it would be nice to have a raised bed for a small vegetable garden. Trying to decide what to build it out of, we settled on brick. There is already a low retaining wall in the backyard, so I thought it would look nice if we matched it.

Building the wall has persuaded me to use different materials next time. The result is fantastic, but the labor was not.

To start, a trench needs to be dug 9″ deep and 16″ wide beneath where the wall will stand.

Next, the trench needs 6″ of gravel leveled and compacted. In three separate trips, Liz and I carried a total of 1850 lbs of this gravel for the base layer. Once the gravel is installed the first layer of brick goes in. Each brick needs to be carefully leveled and aligned to ensure the stability of the wall. After the first layer is laid, things start to go a little faster. Using hammer and chisel to cut and place the partial bricks was not as hard as expected, and I quickly got the first three layers laid. After those three we had to back fill the bed with topsoil. Retaining wall block is not designed to stand freely, so some infill was necessary.

In all, we used around 1200 lbs of topsoil to fill in the raised bed. The final layers went in smoothly, and we had planted all of our sprouts a day ahead of schedule.

We’re hoping to see a lot of vegetables this summer…fingers crossed!