Patio, Veggie Patch, Gabion Trench

(Photo by my wife V, copyright 2022)

Dogs Are Most Important Here

Life at our house revolves around dogs. After the wet winter of 2019, we couldn’t start transforming our garden because dogs took all the time, energy and resources we could give them.

Our beautiful brindle lurcher died in summer 2019. With loads of love, attention and veterinary care, she had been getting better. She was so happy! Then she went into a sharp decline that we couldn’t stop. A scan showed a huge mass in her belly. We lost her. We cried and cried.

We were going to wait a while before taking in another dog, letting our hearts take some time to heal. Life had other plans.

To make a long story short, a pregnant lurcher showed up at a nearby rescue center where we knew the owner. We met the puppies. How can you meet puppies and not fall in love?

In August one of the puppies came home with us. I’ve raised puppies before, but as outdoor dogs with indoor privileges. V’s dogs always arrived as full-grown rescues or fosters and live mainly indoors with outdoor privileges. That’s very different.

Zola’s early puppyhood was intense. She has more stamina than most lurchers and she’s extremely bright. Keeping up with her, socializing her and training her took all the time we could give.

In November, changes at a friend’s house were too much for furry Bertie. He came to stay with us temporarily and decided this is where he wants to live. Zola exhausted him, but they quickly became a bonded pair.

(Photo by V, copyright 2022)

Sedate, gentle playmates they weren’t. We had two beasts to tear up our back garden. We desperately needed to improve it. We had some people take a look at the transformation plan and send a proposal.

By then it was winter again, early 2020. The pandemic arrived.

We never got any proposals because the UK went into lockdown. My wife worked in the NHS, so she still had to go to the hospital. My business interests went quiet.

We are capable women. We would do it ourselves!

Widening the Patio

With the hydrangeas out of the way, we had a couple of small obstacles to the patio expansion.

Paving slabs of the size we already had aren’t readily available any more. They are regarded as too heavy to be safe to handle. We couldn’t buy more anyway. Builders merchants weren’t open. What could we do with what we already had on hand?

In the “before” photos with my previous post, you may have noticed an outdoor table and chairs on a square of paving slabs, tucked in a corner that gets great sun in the afternoon. You may not realize the slabs there are yellow instead of the grey we already had at the patio. Those slabs are square, half the length of the original patio slabs.

The original patio slabs are laid on top of hardcore. It’s a mixture of clay and rocks that packs down very hard. Digging it up is tough. Supposedly the slabs won’t move when set on that, although ours have moved a little here and there.

The square seating area wasn’t on hardcore. Those slabs were on builder’s sand. There were enough to run the length of the patio. All those materials were very movable. We could use a few yellow bricks we had lying around to finish off the last few inches to make up for not having a saw hefty enough to cut a slab to fit. We would have two slabs left over.

After we grumbled about the extension being yellow instead of grey, we decided if it drove us crazy, we could replace them with grey slabs later whenever restrictions eased. (Ultimately the yellow extension strip became a “design feature.”)

(Photo by Bonnie D. Huval, copyright 2020)

During workdays while my wife V was at her job in the NHS, I dug out enough along the patio to be able to transfer the sand as a bed for the patio extension and lay the yellow slabs at the right level. I didn’t have to go much below the surface layer of sod that had been laid years before on top of the clay. The digging wasn’t too difficult.

Later we realized this extension to patio width was crucial and just right. The original width would feel too hemmed in and be awkwardly tight for outdoor tables with chairs. This extension was just enough and not too much.

(Photo by Bonnie D. Huval, copyright 2020)

The photo shows the patio extension almost complete, the buddleia and a stack of lumber we somehow got delivered for the next small task, which needed to be done in time to convert our wildflower patch into a vegetable patch with protection from the dogs.

While I was doing this, V chopped up the ground to the side of the house, added organic matter, spread grass seed and nurtured it. With much effort, patience and nurturing, she succeeded at restoring grass to the extent that our soil would allow, but it was delicate. As soon as we removed temporary wire fence, we were sure it would suffer again.

Little did we know how “easy” these initial chores were within our project.

Veggie Patch

Last week we saw how much produce the grocery store doesn’t have and hardly blinked. Not so in 2020.

In the first pandemic lockdown, the UK had waves of heavy buying, many empty sections on supermarket shelves and widespread distress about shortages. People still joke about how hard it was to find toilet paper. We get ours from a wholesale warehouse and I had bought our usual amount not long before lockdown, so we weren’t looking for any. We had a Brexit stash, so we had non-perishables to get us through a pinch.

Only one person per household could make supply runs. I did ours. If anything we wanted was sparse, I left it for some essential worker who needed to dash in, dash out and get back to keeping people alive. This was not special. It was much discussed on the airwaves as proper courtesy for the times.

With apologies to the insects, we converted the wildflower patch into a veggie patch. (Since then, neighbor Sue got our local Council to grant permission to convert some roadside verge into a wildflower garden. It’s bigger than the meager patch we transitioned to a veggie bed. It’s glorious.)

Our patch gets good sun much of day, especially in summer. The dwarf cherry tree adjacent to it doesn’t shade it much. It needed to be fenced so the dogs wouldn’t rip it to shreds when they played and Bertie wouldn’t pee on our produce.

This involved using whatever lumber I could get, a roll of green-coated wire fencing, a gate ordered from eBay, some large heavy duty angle brackets and whatever screws I had on hand to fence it. When builders merchants began to open again, I got a couple of chunky locally made trellises and tall posts. I put those together as one big trellis at the back of the veggie patch.

V planted, but we never got much of a harvest. Nearly all of our luscious plants were eaten to nubbins by slugs and caterpillars in just a few days when, for reasons I’ll get to later in our saga, we couldn’t reach the veggie bed. Not that defending it would have mattered. As I mentioned last week, nothing we’ve tried sends the slugs or caterpillars away. We only want to deflect them, not kill them, so we switched to crops they don’t like. They can feast across the street at the wildflower patch.

(Photo by V, copyright 2020)

Grapevine Mistake

You may notice I planted a grapevine at the middle of the double trellis. We removed it this winter.

It was the variety with the best odds of bearing some fruit this far north, but being on a wall that didn’t face south cut those odds badly. I didn’t mind because I thought we could make stuffed vine leaves. Last summer it grew like crazy, thriving enough for me to try the recipe.

It was awful. The leaves on our variety were thick, tough, and an awkward shape that didn’t roll well. After discussion with my family, it became clear this would never get better. The Lebanese lady whose stuffed vine leaves we all admired grew a specific variety of grapevine for the shape and quality of its leaves. It didn’t bear fruit. She grew it for its leaves. It wouldn’t have a prayer of growing at all here.

Last summer our runner beans needed a tipi frame to climb. The grapevine took over the entire trellis and tried to climb the fence on top of the highest section of retaining wall. This year, runner beans can have the trellis. The whole trellis!

Gabion Trench

Building a gabion wall was a completely new venture for both of us. We looked up instructions online and planned what to do.

We noticed that a standard gabion basket only lasts 5 to 10 years. This looked like a lot of work. Even without realizing what an understatement that was, we didn’t want to have to redo it anytime soon.

Telford, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, is about a 45 minute drive from us. It’s still a place to make things. We found a business in Telford that makes heavy duty gabion baskets designed to last up to 60 years. The metal is thicker, galvanized and then coated with a protective material. We were deep enough into lockdown for some businesses to have found ways to resume operating. This one was producing and shipping again.

We got three heavy duty gabion baskets. They arrived as flatpacks accompanied by the type of wire needed to lace them together in three dimensional form, also thicker than normal and specially treated. When assembled, each basket would be about 2 meters long, 1 meter high and half a meter across. We would lace them together to make our wall.

In reality, their dimensions were approximate. With their exact measurements, I marked out where the trench needed to be. The gabion wall should not be adjacent to the patio slabs. Its trench should set it back from the slabs a little and the intervening space should be filled with slate chips or gravel. Thinking about how massive the wall would be, that forgiving strip of slate chip made sense.

To get the depth of the trench right, I made a depth checking tool. It was a 2x4 with a small piece of wood swiveling on a nail near one end. If I laid the 2x4 on the existing patio and slid it around, the end of the small piece should barely brush the bottom of the trench. I thought I would need to put a carpenter’s level on top of the tool, but the existing patio slabs were level, so the basic tool was enough.

Every day V went to her job as NHS support staff and I dug. For the gabion trench, I had to go deeper than for the patio extension, below the sod that had once been laid there. Look again at the photo of the patio extension to see what had happened to our lawn. The weather was dry. The clay had turned almost as hard as concrete, killing grass. We had a shovel and a trowel, and no way to obtain anything better.

To make matters worse, our house was the last built in this cluster of houses. When the builders shaped the lot, they hid rubble from other lots in our ground. Dirt from the trench was going to be reused. I didn’t want newly exposed gravel to be flung around by the lawn mower. Larger rubble could be hidden in the bottom and back of the rocks filling the gabion wall. I had to pluck out all of that as I went, sort it by size and stash it.

Every day I gnawed at the trench for at least three hours, usually more like five hours, and dug out maybe a foot and a half of the length we needed to only half the depth we needed. My wrists and hands began to suffer from the repetitive trauma of chopping at the clay as best I could.

The dogs tried to help. They brought their toys out to cheer me up. They dug, but only in the pile of dirt I had excavated, sometimes scattering it back into the trench.

(Photo by Bonnie D. Huval, copyright 2020)

V’s dad hoped we would turn the top of the gabion wall into a long bartop. While I was digging, I realized it would be irresistible to our small nieces and nephews. What little kid could stay off such a temptation? To Sue’s design, I added a low fence behind the gabion wall. In my digging, I had to cut notches for the fence posts.

In late May, when I had been digging nearly two months, I had only gotten this far at half the needed depth. It was disheartening.

(Photo by Bonnie D. Huval, copyright 2020)

Then lockdown eased enough for us to have a socially distanced outdoor visit with V’s parents. The visit was lovely. What they had done to enhance their own garden during lockdown was ambitious and beautiful. Seeing how much they had accomplished with their project was encouraging.

And they had a pickaxe which we were welcome to borrow. A pickaxe!

When we only had a shovel, our clay was too tough for my wife to attack. Now we took turns with the pickaxe. It made short work of the rest of the trench. Here’s V swinging our salvation.

(Photo by Bonnie D. Huval, copyright 2020)

At long last, the gabion trench was ready. A lumber yard near us had reopened, so we got what we needed for the fence behind the gabion wall. (You can see some of it propped against the retaining wall to the left of V.)

It was time to build the fence and the wall.

(Photo by Bonnie D. Huval, copyright 2020)

Tons of Rocks

The gabion stones we liked best online weren’t available. Neither were less appealing products online. In the end, we found a local stone company operating and willing to deliver. We bought what they had. Whatever they had, we would like it. Five tons of it, plus one ton of slate chips for the trench.

That wouldn’t be enough. We calculated that we needed five and a half tons of rock to fill the gabion baskets. Unable to imagine what we would do with an extra half ton of gabion stone, we resolved to scavenge half a ton of other rocks and rubble to hide in the bottom and back of the gabion wall, out of sight, along with rubble dug out of our trench. We got some from friends, some from a family in Wales who had a pile of rocks they wanted to get rid of, and some left in the way at a neighbor’s back garden by a work crew building a huge gabion wall to shore up the bluff where her house sits.

We didn’t realize the tons of stones and ton of slate chips we bought would come to us horribly mucky and in need of cleaning before we could use them. We had much more work to do than just toting those tons around to the back and putting them in place.

The trench was only the beginning of the gabion wall.

The next episode will be about building it.