Garden Update - Buying Plants & Laying A Grass Border

Hello Gardening Community,

It has been a while since my last garden update. The summer is in full swing and with the dip in the weather, I took the opportunity to try and move ahead with some of my gardening plans.

Something we want to do is to add some Thuja plants along the sides of our garden as decorative plants and to provide some border along the garden and increase the privacy.

Before I can plant them, I need to make a grass border for the plant bed and the grass. The plan is to make this around the complete border of the garden.

The first thing I did was go to the garden centre and search for the Thujas. Once I found them at Hornbach, it took me 2 journeys to buy enough that we needed.

The boot was full each time but luckily I got in enough that we needed. The total cost was around €250. I did suggest to my wife that we should try to grow them from sapplings, but that would take around 10 years to get them to the size that we want.

With the plants successfully delivered home, I then needed to go and get the required building materials for the grass border. I made a short itinerary of what we needed:

Initially around 2m² of stones, some gravels stones for the base. The remaining tools and materials I already had. I would need a guide line for making the grass border, some small posts, a hammer and gloves for carrying the border stones.

I decided to use the drive in at Hornbach as they are quite efficient there and found the stones that I wanted quickly enough. I would need to also make 2 journeys as the weight would be too much for my car without using a trailer or renting a van.

With everything in, I could proceed back to the garden and get started already.

First up, I drew up my guide line and put a few stones down on how it would look like. We want enough space as these Thujas will grow quite thick.

I recently bought a special straight shovel for just this particular type of job. I then started removing the soil and putting it into the wheelbarrow.

I measured the depth that I would need to be around 8cm from the base. This would be 6cm for the stones and then 2cm for the splitt/gravel stones.

I was making rapid progress and was surprised how quickly I filled the wheelbarrow.

I started putting a gravel base for the stones in.

Getting the first stones in there was no problem. But I soon realised I had made the edge too close to the guide line so would need to try and take make a bigger gap to follow the guide without any problems.

Things progressed quite well and soon I would then need to just fill in the soil down the sides of the stones to keep them nice and stable.

The final stones were laid and it was ready to fill in the sides now. My son gave me a hand with the soil and got his old wheelbarrow out.

My son also wanted to play some football, so I squeezed a bit of footy in there too.

I filled in the sides to make the stones fit nice and tight ready for watering down.

Afterward, I washed everything down to look for more gaps and refilled them in. The finished result looked like this.

This is only the first part, next I will do along the back and then down the other side. Overall, it is a simple job I would say, but a nice and fun one to do.

Once the grass borders are done, we will remove the grass and then plant the Thujas. I have bought some fertilised soil ready for them and am planning on having one every half a meter.

How are your garden plans working out this summer?

Credits:
All images and photos are my own.

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