|
Hope you find the DIY gardening articles interesting and helpful
Gardens large, sloping and small, a garden for disabled or elderly gardeners, I landscape them all.
Details and contact are on my front page
flowerpotman
Landscape gardeners
|
 |
| Mike the old landscape gardener |
|
|
Building natural dry stone retaining walls in a garden.
If you have a steep garden that's making garden maintenance, digging or planting your garden or mowing your lawn difficult, especially when the surface is wet and you are thinking about constructing dry stone retaining walls, depending on how steep the garden is, this can be fairly simple. Its impossible to learn the practical skills on a webpage but these tips, providing you have got the time, may help to practice as you build your own dry stone wall in the garden. If it all falls down, providing its not yet retaining anything, all you will have lost is time, you will still have the stone to try again and maybe again. Or to call me in
build it for you.
Retaining walls have been built and used to retain sloping earth for thousands of years. Almost all early retaining walls were, dry stone walls, built using stacked stone without any mortar to hold the retaining wall together, instead of mortar the walls were held together by the weight of stone, and the way the stones were matched and fitted together in a way that as they settle over time, they become stronger and more closely bound.
Get your Dry stone walling right and it is more durable than Breeze blocks, Pre formed concrete stacking stones and even Cropped and cemented natural stone, because it contains no mortar to crack and break up and will never need pointing or rendering. Dry stone retaining walls look better too, especially in a natural setting like a cottage garden. If you are sourcing the stone locally and not transporting it half way round the world its the most sustainable and eco friendly way to retain your garden, I can think of.
When planning to retain earth, bear in mind the retaining walls need to be able to withstand gravity and frost, this affects all retaining walls. You will need to build the retaining wall strong enough to offset the pushing force of the soil its holding back. A single cubic foot of wet soil can weigh up to 100 pounds. Large stones that have lots of surface area touching one another survive because the friction of the stones rubbing against one another, works against the pushing force exerted by the soil.
Retaining walls built up to about 3-feet high are fairly easy to construct as the force of gravity against them is not to great. You counteract this force on the dry stone wall by building the wall so it leans back a bit and is not perfectly plumb. this offsets the center of gravity of the stone wall making it harder to topple over.
|
|
High dry stone walls are at the greatest risk of failure and you need to be aware that as the retaining wall height increases, the force trying to topple the wall increases by a large factor. For example, if you double the height of a wall, the tipping force can increase by a factor of three or four times.
Frozen soil expands as it freezes and can seriously damage retaining walls .So in areas where frost is likely this is minimised by backfilling the wall with gravel. The soil and area itself needs to be well drained so that water can't build up behind the wall. If its not possible to drain the water away from the wall because the slope in the garden behind the wall is to severe, the water can be drained through the wall by installing weep holes at the base of the wall.
Depending what is built under the wall,you then may have to think about where this water is going to be drained to. Garden Drainage information can be found on my garden drainage page
For a low maintenance garden for the disabled, ideals and layout including raised garden beds please visit my disabled gardening page.
Whilst natural stone is still the best material to build garden walls, looking especially attractive in cottage gardens and other natural looking gardens, it is expensive and may not match the design of the rest of your garden.
Garden walls can be built using wood, railway sleepers, breeze blocks, house bricks and specially designed decorative stackable concrete block that will match your patio.
The choice of material,although important, is not as important as getting the design of the wall right. The base of the retaining wall cannot be laid directly onto top soil, a concrete or compacted stone foundation is essential to avoid soil creep. Hope this helps, there's more information about materials you can use to build garden walls on my sloping garden page.
|
|
|
Dobies and Suttons seeds are the gardening suppliers I use and have always got new special gardening offers, check out this weeks gardeners offers to make sure you don't miss out.
more info gardeners shop
|
|
