Garden Bed

The day I have anticipated since I moved to this house, has finally arrived! Hurray! Bags and bags of garden soil, mulch and concrete blocks have been delivered and my famous brother in law John is here to do the heavy lifting. 

 All this will soon disappear and be transformed into my shade garden.

 A few hours later and here it is! John is putting the finishing touches on the corner brick. He is very clever and wants it to be 'just so'. I am way appreciative. These blocks are larger than standard with a much bigger opening, making them great for individual plantings. Two layers high give the bed a possible depth of 16 inches, although we really won't be filling it completely, it is possible some of the perennials I plan to put here will root deeply. 

The rough dimensions are 8 inches high, 12 inches wide and sixteen inches long. I've used these before in several gardens and they work beautifully. We got them from Lowe's. John also used rebar to stabilize the perimeter, and I don't anticipate much settling since the base underneath is clay and gravel. The first layer to go in was mulch, which works l as a leveling agent for the blocks and helps with drainage.  The fill for the bed was Stay Green garden soil which is currently on sale, as is the mulch. 80 1 cu. bags of soil and 16 2 cu bags of mulch which is also to be used in the front yard.

There is a vent to the crawl space which needed to be open to the air, so John constructed this separator. What a guy! He also configured a hidden solution for the gutter drain pipe. I am so blessed to have this engineer construct my garden. But I must say that is was so difficult not to do this all myself, but my old legs just can't anymore, so I stayed indoors and tried to keep busy.  

 And here it is all filled and ready to water in and then plant. Just as I imagined, the soil reaches the base of the deck and covers all the unsightly stuff like the concrete and clay underneath the deck floor. 

I am thrilled! It has been ages since I had a shade garden which is one of my fave things, plant wise.  Lots of specimen hostas, heucheras and caladiums will form the structure and I have also pre-rooted nasturtiums seeds which have sprouted and will go in some of the block openings. Begonias, astilbe, tiarellas,  celandine poppys,  elephant ears, and maybe hydrangea, are on my shopping list... oooooooh!

 The grass has grown like crazy and we just had a full day of rain this past week, so the once miserably junked up yard is a thing of the past.