Terracing a sloping garden

If your garden has a steep slope, leveling it by terracing can make it both attractive and useable. One benefit of a terraced garden is that it stops soil erosion and rain water washing the nutrients away making it difficult to plant and maintain most shallow rooting garden plants. However the main benefit you will find after leveling the slope and forming terraces, apart from the garden being easier to work on and get around making it an enjoyable garden to be in instead of a daily challenge are the paved or decked dining and entertaining areas that can be built in, meaning you and your guests no longer find yourself rolling down steep grassy slopes.

 Terracing a sloping garden also adds interest, allowing planting at different levels, flowers at the top and vegetables at the bottom, paved area at the top flowers in the middle and fruit bushes at the bottom etc. The combinations are endless and unlike a garden with one steep slope, plant choice is not limited because of soil erosion . Leveling a garden that either slopes away or toward the house into terraces will give you many more design and planting options in your garden.

What materials can be used to terrace a sloping garden?
There are two main ways of terracing a sloping garden. One is to build stone retaining walls, using  pre formed concrete stacking  blocks (not cheap), breeze blocks (relatively cheap) or natural stone (expensive).
The other is  useing  wood to form the retaining walls. Reclaimed railway sleepers are fairly cheap and treated to last, the downside with railway sleepers, is the treatment used to preserve them and the tar and other messy materials that have covered them over the years whilst they have been holding railway lines together,  make them unsuitable for sitting on or contact with bare skin, especially if you suffer from allergies. The safer but slightly more expensive wooden option is to build the retaining walls using new Oak beams or sleepers, these will need to be treated over the years to prevent them from rotting.

Can I level a sloping garden myself?
Leveling and terracing a sloping garden takes a lot of time and effort shifting earth and in new build houses, digging out clay and all sorts of builders rubble from dumped concrete to coke cans and even buried machinery parts but It is a job you can handle yourself if you cant afford to hire a professional landscaper. But bear in mind, if things start to go wrong and you end up calling in a landscape gardener to put it right when the walls retaining the terraces start to give, it will be a lot more expensive in the end.

How to terrace a slope, build a retaining wall in a sloping garden.
 If you do decide to terrace the slope yourself it will be worth the hard graft, stopping the impact of erosion by forming even a short slope into terraces will save money on plants and make the area more workable, also lawned areas will be easier to cut.
 You can use a range of materials to form the retaining walls from the two main ones we have discussed earlier, treated wood or stone,  through to house bricks (reclaimed brick makes an attractive wall), concrete, quarry rocks and if the terracing isn't very steep,even compacted piled earth. The durability of the wall will depend on the material you use and the quality of the footings you build the wall on. 

Basic design advice for building  a retaining wall.
Try to keep the maximum height of your walls to about two foot, anything higher make sure the retaining wall leans slightly back into the soil, not perfectly plumb and is built on a sound footing. Retaining walls take a lot of pressure from the weight of the soil and in our climate rain water behind the wall . (A single cubic foot of wet soil can weigh up to 100 pounds). If you are using cemented stone or concrete to retain the terraces in the slope, form weep holes in the bottom of the wall.