I am so excited to share one of my favourite DIY projects, our raised stone flowerbeds. These were a weekend project that made a huge impact in our backyard.
Chris and I had talked about adding some raised flowerbeds along our back fence after we built the second deck (now referred to as “mini deck”). Because there is already a lot of wood in the backyard Chris and I agreed something a little different – like stone – would be a nice change.
I immediately went to Pinterest and really loved the look of this photo from Northern Exposure Gardening:
I had a hard time finding stones like in the photo, but I did find these stones on sale at my local Home Depot and started planning.
I started by marking out where I wanted the front of the flowerbeds to be and then dug a trench for the stones to sit in. Our backyard is sloped so to make sure both the flowerbeds were level with each other Chris helped me dig a deeper trench on one side of the yard.
The flowerbeds are made up of two parts, the fronts are stacked stones and the sides and back are 2×6 pressure treated screwed together into a short piece of 2×4 to create a sort of U shape.
I’ll fully admit that I was making this up as I went along. Thankfully Chris is used to me by now so he was happy enough to help out without asking too many questions like “what do we do next?”.
Once the wood frames were built, in place and level Chris and I stacked the stones to make sure we liked the placement. I had to use a chisel to cut some stones in half to make them line up nicely (I used this one and it was ah-mazing).
Technically I could have called it a day at this point, but I felt that the stones were a little too wobbly so I decided to use some landscape adhesive between the stones to make them extra secure.
Because I was super lazy and did not want to dig up more sod than I had to I put a layer of newspaper and mulch down to help kill the grass. The rest of the flowerbeds were filled with a combination of top soil and sheep manure.
And flowers…lots of flowers. For a while the backyard felt like a garden centre – it was actually kind of awesome.
So far I’ve planted climbing roses, clematis and honeysuckle along with some annuals I picked up from an end of season sale. Next I hope to add some sort of trellis to each bed for the plants to climb.
