Brick Garden Beds

This is where I've been spending most of my time since the snow melted...

Wow!  I didn't even realize just how bad my garden looked until I saw this photo.  Funny how you just get used to ugliness when you ignore it.

Last year I sort of gave up on my garden but this year I was determined to put an end to the ugliness.  First thing to go was all the wooden borders on the garden beds.  If any of you are thinking about making raised beds, I strongly urge you to stay away from wood.  Over time the wood just rots and you end up with a pile like this:

And you'll spend half a season replacing it all again.  Most of this wood has been here since before I bought the house, but I'm sure it was in pretty bad shape when I got here.

I scored a major steal when a friend of mine donated loads of bricks to me.  They've been sitting in his yard for over 30 years so he was happy just to see someone finally putting them to use.  They were from an old building in town that got demolished in the 80's.  So, now I have a bit of municipal heritage right here in my own back yard!

I had to do a lot of weeding and then built small trenches to fit the bricks into.  It was fun because it was like a puzzle.  I wanted them all to fit together perfectly, without mortar, just all sandwiched together.

I also had to get right into the raspberry bushes and thin them out.  They didn't like it but in the end I won the battle.

I'm slowly adding some prettiness back into the space.

I'm still working on this area but I've created a clearing, away from the ants, where I can sit quietly and meditate, or pull out a yoga mat and do some stretches.

I couldn't get the ground completely level so I just used bricks under the pallets to balance them.  When I found my pallets I made sure to grab the ones that had the slates close together.  This whole area is in the shade in the morning and the branch overhead provides some shade in the evening.

I'm just waiting to get my hands on some free gravel to pour over top of the wood shavings.  My hope is that this will add some contrast to the bricks and help to keep down the weeds.  There's landscape fabric or newspaper under most of it but that disintegrates over time.  And the weeds in my garden are pretty relentless, so the more layers they have to get through, the better.

It's all slowly coming along though and I'm happy with it.  I love throwing on a folksy playlist on Songza and just spending the whole entire day working out there.

I've planted lots of veggies, so hopefully in a few months I'll be able to bring you an update that's a little greener~

Do you have a garden that's out of control?  Any tips and tricks for keeping everything in it's place?  Leave a comment below~