Retaining Wall
Background
After completing the vegetable garden renovation, the next step was to build a retaining wall around the orange trees. My main motivation came from two observations:
- The previous owners had installed yellow extruded curbing as the divider between the lawn and the garden, and it’s ugly.
- The extruded curbing doesn’t actually do such a great job of keeping the lawn out of the garden — I was regularly having to cut back the lawn runners out of the garden bed.
My sister was cleaning up her backyard and had a whole bunch of bricks to get rid of, so I took them off her hands for the retaining wall.
Bricklaying
Lana’s parents were in town at the time, so Lana’s Dad gave me a hand to lay concrete footings for the wall. And to show me a classic old gag with the hose. :-S
Next I laid 3 courses of bricks around the garden bed, including two step-like sections. These are actually planter boxes, I specifically included big holes in the concrete footings underneath them so they’d have drainage. The idea is that we can plant some small herbs or something in them, and they break up the visual line of the retaining wall as well as making it stronger.
Rendering
The next piece of the job was to render the outside, something I’d never done before. Rendering turned out to be a lot harder than I’d expected, it’s terribly difficult to get the render to stick to the bricks and to get a smooth surface at the same time. I used some rather harsh language during the process.
The solution in the end was to make the render mix a little bit wetter than the recommendation on the pack, and then to go over the render with a wet sponge when I’d finished. That gave me a nice smooth overall look with a slightly textured surface.
After finally getting the render to look okay, I woke up the next morning to discover that one of the local cats had decided to sign their name in my beautiful work!
Painting
I picked a dark slightly-blue charcoal paint to finish it off, which actually looks a lot more blue in these photos than it does in real life. Eventually I’ll carry this colour through the rest of the garden — on to the chicken coop and other constructions as they eventuate.
I also need to pick a colour for the back fence now, I’m looking forward to covering up the grey of the super6 fencing. Perhaps a nice coffee colour?
Reticulation
The garden bed around the orange trees is a trial area for a different kind of reticulation for us. The rest of our garden is done with sprayers, but they tend to be a lot of work to maintain, and I often find that one plant grows up and blocks the water supply to the plants behind it.
For this garden bed we decide to use a drip line that’s made out of recycled rubber from car tyres. The whole length of the line seeps water, and you can bury it under the mulch. I’m happy to report that it’s doing a terrific job: the surface of the mulch is dry, but a few inches down the soil is constantly moist. Perfect for happy plants.
A successful project!
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