Gardening has been a hobby of ours for a long time. We've done container gardening for the most part with the exception of a few plants that we planted in ground.
We dreamed of having a proper garden for a long time and this year we finally made it a reality!
If you follow me on social media, you probably have already seen our beautiful DIY Garden and DIY Greenhouse.
We had side yard that we considered wasted space because of our house's layout. It sat as a patch of weeds for years!
And early this year I finally made a game plan for what I wanted it to be.
We started by building a greenhouse with our own hands (tutorial coming soon).
Simultaneously, we started working on the garden portion.
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We first took care of the weeds and grass that were there. We used our weed wacker to remove everything above ground, followed by two rounds of this weed and grass killer and waited about a day between applications.
After that, we used a professional grade landscaping fabric (here's a similar one). You could secure it with spikes, but we skipped them since we were later going to lay a few tons of material right on top of it.
We put a layer of decomposed granite (aka crushed granite) to serve as the base. We got this from our local bulk soil and mulch manufacturer. After laying it, we leveled it and made sure to follow our house's existing drainage slope.
After that we tamped it to form a firm base for the top material. We used this manual tamper but I also know most hardware stores rent equipment if you don't want to do it manually.
Next, the top layer: washed limestone. The crushed granite and limestone were delivered at the front of the house, so we used a wheelbarrow to move the material to our backyard. One thing we would definitely do if we were to do this again would be getting a heavy duty wheelbarrow like this one. Ours was a plastic one and felt so flimsy!
I decided at the very last minute that I wanted a paver pathway. I wanted medium sized paver and I knew I wanted the to be dark so they would stand out from the limestone.
These pavers were the perfect size and color (here's a similar, lighter one). We used a bit of paver sand under each one of them to level them, and used spacers (I marked a 2x4 and used a piece of scrap wood) to make sure that they were aligned and perfectly spaced.
Time for the limestone! We used our wheelbarrow to transfer all the material from the driveway and used our rake to spread it out.
The final step of our dream garden: raised garden beds. I researched a lot and even considered building my own.
I ended up buying these modular raised garden beds. One kit can make different configurations, and I used them to make two 16in tall ones out of each kit and had a total of 6 beds (3 kits).
I also bought arch trellises (ours sold out so these are similar ones) to support our vines. This was absolutely the right call! They look super pretty and work great!
We filled the raised beds up with soil purchased from the same place as the granite and topped the beds off with this super rich organic soil that our plants love!
We've spent the last few months taking care of our plants and spending a whole lot of time out there in our garden and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Do you have a side yard that you would turn into a garden?