Taking the Edge Off

Actually, we put the edge on. Our garden, that is. Welcome to another week of backyard/patio updates! This week, we’re planning on covering:

• Edging the garden (today)
• Our seating progress
• A bit of decor for said seating
• Some yard-saling adventures that ended with both indoor and outdoor ramifications

Sound like a big week? It totally is and we’re psyched to fill you in on all of the juicy details. Back to that garden- when you first saw it in this video, it looked something like this:

Looks a little messy, huh? We thought so too. The goal with this project was two-fold: to clean up the garden a bit and to actually define the garden bed and set it apart from the grass. As you can see in the shot above, there’s no specific point in which the grass ends and the garden begins. So, the first thing I did was create an edge to the garden bed.

Once I had the outline of where the garden would begin, I began “tilling” the garden soil and picking some of the weeds out to create a better environment for planting new things. This also helped to get dirt out of the way for what would become my edging.

My first instinct was to just dig out a little path and wait until our next Home Depot visit to get some rectangular rocks to line it with. And then I remembered that we have this in our backyard:River rocks galore! After multiple trips (which was quite the workout, might I add?) with armfuls of stones, I had a nice pile to start arranging. This was the fun part. I liked making different combinations of rocks and figuring out what would fit where in the line up.Before setting them in their final places, I made a mock version on the grass, just outside of the actual garden. That way, I could arrange and rearrange without having to deal with digging them out of the dirt over and over again.

And once I had an arrangement I liked, I just moved them into the dirt! After placing each rock, I stepped on it to set it in place and added dirt underneath if it needed a little boost to be even with the others.

Before long, I had a finished (well, the edging part) garden bed! This was a funny project because I had originally come outside just to do some jump roping, not expecting to find myself knee deep in river rocks. I pulled a few weeds out of the garden, one thing led to another, and this was the final product:

Not bad for a whoops-I-didn’t-mean-to-go-this-far-but-I-guess-we’re-going-for-it project! And here’s the view from the other side:

It wraps around to meet the fence line and provide some “closure” to our side of the yard, as our neighbors’ property is to the left of the fence. In terms of the rocks, you can see how they play nicely with the colors in the brick work. Down by the river, there were some lighter/whiter colored ones that I was tempted to grab, but in the end, decided to stick with the reds and browns. I think it helps to highlight the garden, but compliment the patio at the same time. Hooray for accidental projects! And for creeks in the backyard. How about one last before and after shot comparison, just for fun? Here’s the before:And the happily ever after:

As you can tell, we still have some work to do with this garden. Weeding, planting some flowers (and veggies, hopefully!), and more weeding are next on the to-do list. More on those details when it happens! Any new features to your garden? Spill the beans!

-Leslie