Custom metal outdoor garden beds, with a bonus babbling fountain

This post is about another of our long-term, seemingly never-ending house and yard projects, custom metal planter beds in the backyard. The difference is, this one is actually done!

There is a reason this project took so long. We put up a nice new garage in 2007, which pretty much demolished the already shameful backyard.  We did a lot of landscaping close to the house in 2008 and 2009, and then in fall and winter of  2009 we built the trellis around what will become our "outdoor room".

It's not quite there yet; it needs "flooring", which I have vowed to do this coming summer.  I really couldn't do it before now because (1) the room needed to be cleared of bricks and boards, which finally happened when we recently completed the reclaimed brick paths around the garden, and (2) the metal planter boxes had not been in.  The planter boxes and fountain were actually completed in the first half of 2014. I just never got around to blogging about them.  So here goes.

Before pictures

This is the space to the side of the garage in October 2013, just as I submitted my hand-sketched plans to a metal shop to build us some shallow planter boxes. The round rocks piled in the center of the flowers are granite cobbles that were on the property when Drew bought it. I had a co-worker drill holes in them the size of a piece of copper pipe I had been hoarding. That's the start of the fountain.

This is the space at the back of the garage where the veggie garden beds will go.

Before the ground froze, I dug down to where the bottom of the metal pieces would go.

Then I covered the space so that snow would not saturate the ground through the first couple of big snow storms while waiting for the metal guys to do their work.

 During

It was January 16, 2014 by the time the pieces were ready and the crew could come out and attach the borders to the concrete foundation of the garage. 

Installed and nearly ready to accept plants in the spring of 2014!

The sprinkler pipe runs under the metal edge into the bed.

I back filled with pea gravel under the metal to provide some drainage.

 

Post-metal installation

May 2014: First garden in the new beds! Peppers did well on this south facing, elevated bed.

I don't have a great picture of the smaller of the two back side boxes, but this one shows the red rock mulch, hose reel stand, and the place for the rain barrel.

So while I had good veggies growing in the big south bed, the side yard, which I wanted to plant with ornamentals to bring us joy when we finally do get to sit in the outdoor room, needed more work.

A blank slate

 A Water Feature

Drew especially wanted a water fountain to bring the soothing sound of flowing water to our urban setting.  I was all on board because, at the time, we had some pretty loud young kids living next door, and I thought the sound would drown them out. Ha ha, get it.

Pre-positioning the fountain

I didn't really follow any specific directions to make the fountain, but I've read probably 30 step-by-step instructions in various home and garden magazines over the past 20 years, so I just combined them.  We decided not to have open water because it can harbor mosquitoes (West Nile Virus!) and I didn't want the cats drinking rotten pond water. Like I said, my co-worker drilled holes in the cobbles for me.  Next, I needed a reservoir and some way to support the very heavy stack of cobbles.

A smallish pond liner was the only thing I could find that was shallow enough and fit in the planter bed.  Then I added concrete blocks and a pump I had from a patio fountain I had made several years ago. 

Wire mesh topped by some sort of plastic coated concrete reinforcement mesh would keep out the pebbles. 

When I put it all together and plugged in the pump, I was delighted to see it worked!

Once that was in, I transplanted the bamboo from another area in the yard and added some blue mondo grass and annuals for color.

 

After pictures

Add the finishing touch of my favorite Mexican beach pebbles and mulch.

A poor panorama picture, but you get the big picture. 

So that was in June, 2014.  The plants are still alive and the pump still works. In the heat of summer, I have to fill the reservoir with the hose for a few minutes each time I plug in the fountain. We don't have it on unless we are in the backyard.  I have to drain the reservoir each winter, which is kind of a pain, but the sound of the fountain is lovely to hear as I work in the garden.  This space is going to be great once we get the patio built around it.

Recycled brick paths

Drew and I built a brick pathway around the back garden area using bricks from the back wall of our house, salvaged (Drew would say, scavenged) during the 2010 addition. It took us over 5 years but it's done now. Here's how.

As readers know, we tore out the back brick wall of our bungalow during the 2010 remodel/addition.  You can see the gory details here, but in case you don't want to relive the horror (and it was horror), here are a few pics from that spring.

The back wall of the house in June 2010 after the contractor lopped off the back shed area. The green bricks on the right were part of a double layer brick wall that would later become the pathways, although I didn't know that was the purpose at the time.

The bricks coming down.

 No wall remains.

The bricks were technically available for reuse in June of 2010, however, we were a little busy with that other project for about a year.  It continues still, but nevertheless, important yard projects need to be done.  Fast forward to June of 2014, after moving the piles of bricks from the pergola to the narrow breezeway between the vinyl fence and the garage back to the pergola again, I finally started to clean the bricks of mortar so they could be reused for the pathway around the vegetable garden.

This was my cleaning station.  I can't believe there isn't a beer bottle in this picture. I drank a lot of beer while sitting there, chiseling mortar off the bricks, listening to podcasts on my headphones.

Piles of clean bricks. I probably spent about 40 hours cleaning bricks. 

Once I had enough bricks to get me going, and I had the pathways all graded out the way I wanted them (no small feat!) I started laying bricks. August 14, 2014 was an exciting project day.

8/14/14 The first flight of bricks that I laid. I leveled the soil under the paths, then leveled and tamped 1-2 inches of sand, then pounded stakes in to anchor the plastic edging, before laying an alternating pattern of bricks. I used screws for spacers.

8/20/2014. Coming along.

11/30/2014. I laid about 20 to 25 feet of pathway before winter last year, making it almost to the compost bins so we would have a walkway to tread upon to take out the compost.

Things picked up again last spring. Drew got involved in the project once he found out power tools were involved.  We had a system where I would lay out the pattern and mark the bricks that needed to be cut, and he would do the dirty work cutting them with a masonry blade on the circular saw.  

Spring and summer 2015's work.  The corners were tricky, but Drew helped by doing most of the cutting and schlepping bricks.

By late summer, the easy straight run next to the vinyl fence was done and I came to another tricky part. I had to build a "retaining wall" under the ally fence to keep the bricks in the yard plus figure out how to leave open the escape route the cats like to use to get to the ally.

10/16/2015. Here come the bricks from the left. What a mess.

10/16/2015 Looking out from the yard.

10/17/2015. A good day's work.  The escape route for the cats is in the foreground and the gate to the alley is to the upper right.

Close up of the escape dugout for the cats.  They like to run wild back in the alley, and it would be difficult for them to get over the 6-foot vinyl fence, so I terraced the bricks just enough that they can squeeze through on their bellies.

Looking down from the top of the fence to the very large and extremely heavy rock Drew dug in to the alley as a "landing pad" for the cats to slither onto from the escape dugout.

11/17/2015. A few more days of bricklaying got me to this point.

But is was after this that I realized I didn't have enough bricks from the remodel to finish the project.  So, in true Lucy fashion, I ripped up the mini patio I had laid for the garbage cans back in Fall 2011, 

which had been my "permanent" solution to the temporary flagstone mini patio I created in 2008.

   

So now I had enough reused bricks to reuse again, but then another difficult area, which included 1) turning a corner and joining the path back to where I started, 2) widening to extend to the pergola exit, and 3) adding a rock under the downspout.

The final push.

I carried on, racing against shorter and shorter days while doing a lot of field work for work, until finally on Nov 22, with Drew's help, we finished.
 

11/22/2015: ALL DONE!  It was so cold our fingers were numb and mine were cracked and bleeding from a long weekend of brick work, but a big storm was in the near forecast so we hammered it out until 7 PM on a Sunday night.

What a feeling of accomplishment!  This project, which I started planning and pondering in 2010 to "save money" and use a recycled product instead of buying new, took me countless hours and put a serious tight spot in my hamstring that I still feel today.  But I really love the character the paths give to the garden, and they make it so easy to get my wheel barrel and garden implements around the main bed.  Here are a couple of "after" pictures.

 

And we finished none too soon, for the snow came with a vengeance in the next few weeks.

12/16/2015

 

But what about the poor transient trash cans?  Well, I rounded up some rectangular concrete pavers we had in the yard from various other projects (in my pack rat midden), bought some new red ones, and voila! An even, level checkerboard mini patio for the trash cans.  I hope this is their last resting spot. 

 

Drew and the “Navy” Bean Stalk

 

Our backyard has a very low-maintenance, privacy-giving vinyl fence.  Those good points do, in fact, outweigh the bad points, but  it is still quite plain and ugly.  I have been trying to come up with ideas of what to plant in the 23-inch wide strip of ground between the driveway and the fence that would be tall and very skinny enough to camouflage it.  We pile snow on this strip in the winter so it has to be an annual, or at least a perennial that I can cut all the way back. Why not make it something useful or edible?  This year, I came up with pole beans.

I planted the beans about the end of May.  They came up right away and so we needed to get some sort of trellis in place so they could do their camo thing.

My plan was to tie up some string to the tops of the fence posts.  Drew took it a giant leap further by using scrap wood (that I had been hording since the home addition) to frame up a support system and outfit it with string down to each little plant.  Because he had a big role in the culture of these beans, he took to calling them “Navy beans”.  In reality, they were Blue Lake pole beans. 

 

Then we watched them grow.

June 10:

 

June 28:

 

 

July 17

(Wow! That was 19 days between pictures.  We could see them changing day by day during this period.)

July 27:

Still no beans to harvest yet, but they were close at this point.

August 12: Bean harvest started.

 

August 23: Too many beans to eat. Full camouflage.

 

And finally October 12: Very tired of eating beans.

This was my first serious attempt at growing pole green beans.  Like I said, the variety was Blue Lake, and they were pretty tasty as long as I picked them very early before any bean bulges started to show.  Otherwise they were stringy and tough.  I froze what we couldn’t eat, although I think frozen green beans might be a hard sell on Drew.