Building Planter Frame
2005.09.25
This morning I went to Home Depot again, and got some metal brackets for the front corner and a “mending plate” for the butt connection along the long side.
I checked to make sure that everything was level and reasonably straight along the wall. While I was doing this, one of the neighborhood cats wandered into my yard, and investigated the pile of mason’s sand, which I’m sure looked like the mother of all kitty litter piles.
One day earlier this summer, I had purchased a bundle of 24″ long 1x1 stakes. I don’t know why… I think I was planning to use them along with a string line to see how much the yard sloped from front to back or something. At any rate, they now came in handy as I decided to use them to help secure the planting bed wall. As you can tell, I had really thought this project out well before jumping into it… I drove in the stakes and then screwed them to the boards.
After getting the outside wall all secured, I moved on to constructing another wall around a basement window that would otherwise be partially covered. (As it happens, during some remodel of the house before I bought it, they just ran drywall right over that window on the inside, so it’s not actually a useful window currently.) I had purchased a couple more 2x6x12’s than I ended up needing (always a challenge to figure out how many boards of a certain length you need to cover some overall linear footage). I hadn’t been happy with the various concrete paving products at Home Depot, and didn’t want to spend the money or time trying to find some nice stone, so I decided 2x6’s would be fine. I have a potential future project in mind to cut in an egress window where that small window is now, so as with the front wall of the planting bed, this will probably also be somewhat temporary.
Of course I didn’t have any more metal brackets, and I was also running out of screws, so I made yet another trip to Home Depot.
This project was the first opportunity to use my Milwaukee circular saw, starting yesterday with the boards for the front part of the wall, and then today building the window well. It has a nice 15-amp / 3 horsepower motor, and various bells and whistles. Circular saws kinda scare me, but this one is as safe as they can be, and I’m happy to report that I didn’t chop a hand off or anything.
There is an existing metal window well at the basement window, with some gravel inside. At first I was going to dig this out, but then I decided it would be a lot easier if I just left it in place and built the new one around it. So I measured the outside dimensions, and then cut some 2x6 pieces. I screwed them together in the same fashion as the outside wall, and then slid the assembly into place. It was a very snug fit against the metal window well. It bothers me that the window wells are not centered on the window frame but…
After that was complete, I began laying out some landscaping fabric along the foundation wall. Since nothing (except weeds) would really grow up against the foundation wall and within the roof overhang, my plan was to fill this area with pea gravel for about a foot out from the house. The landscaping fabric should help suppress the weeds in the existing soil below, while still allowing water to percolate down. After laying the fabric out, I began tacking it down with some large staples designed for that purpose.
To help make a reasonably straight line division between the pea gravel at the back and the soil at the front of the planting bed, I pulled some old cedar fence boards out of the garage (which I had removed after they were sprayed with graffiti), and set them along the front edge of where I wanted the pea gravel. I wrapped the landscaping fabric over them, and they managed to hold themselves upright, at least for a while.
I loaded up the wheelbarrow with pea gravel, and started in the back corner next to the front porch. After a couple loads, I had some concerns about running out of pea gravel, even though my calculation of one cubic yard should have been enough (although barely enough). So I decided to use mason’s sand as the bottom layer of this section, since I had plenty of that.
After getting sand and gravel filled in some of the way, I started bringing in the soil to fill up the main part of the planting bed. For planting soil, I mixed two parts compost with one part topsoil and one part mason’s sand. I’m hardly an expert on gardening, but this follows some general suggestions by a landscape architect friend of mine, and I figure it should work pretty well. Besides, the “topsoil” they brought was a little suspect in my opinion (this seems to be a common complaint all over the country), and the compost was cheaper anyway. Although mixing the soil was an extra step compared to the sand or pea gravel fill, at least I could just dump the wheelbarrow into the planting bed, instead of transferring the material one shovelful at a time.
Before dumping in the new soil, I laid down some newspapers as a temporary weed barrier. I decided not to use the landscaping fabric in the actual planting area, because the stuff lasts for eons and therefore tends to inhibit root growth of the plants. Sure, you cut a hole in it to stick the plant in, but what happens when roots spread out horizontally above the fabric, then want to go down below it? At any rate, I had read numerous sources promoting the idea of putting down newspapers or kraft paper. These materials are biodegradable and so will eventually just break down into the soil, but they hold the weeds at bay for a while, hopefully giving the plants some time to get established first. By the way, old advice was to only use newspapers with black ink, as the color inks were petroleum-based and toxic. But many, if not most newspapers these days use soy-based color inks, including the local Oregonian and Tribune papers.
By 6:00 pm, I was worn out, so I decided to quit for now. I’d only have about an hour of good daylight left anyway, and I needed some of that time to clean up and put tools back in the garage. So, I’ve only got about a 6″ deep layer of soil, sand, and pea gravel spread along most of the front part of the planting bed. I have all of the long side to do, and then another 6″ or so on top of all of that. It was about two and a half hours of hauling, dumping, and spreading, so… looks like next weekend will be very busy.
Front Planting Bed