jeff57
Full Member
Posts: 12
Joined: Tue Aug 30, 2011 11:42 pm
Location: Middletown, DE

Garden construction

I am redesigning my garden for next year. I am going from multiple beds to a 30'x30' square garden. I am doing this to ease in soil additions, lessening grass clippings, ease in watering etc. I am also doing this because this years drought brought in a lot more groundhogs and rabbits seeking moisture out of my tomatoes. I wanted to build a cinder block wall around the garden. I wanted to use cinder blocks because of they can give me a good solid wall to ward off garden invaders, plus I could use the top of the wall as planting space for my herbs. I am worried about the wall blocking light and being detrimental to drainage if we were to get a big rain storm. My yard gets light for the majority of the day in the summer so I thought that the shade provided by the wall might be good for some plants. I also figured I could place some blocks perpendicular to the wall to provide some vertical growing spots. Any advice?

nickolas
Senior Member
Posts: 161
Joined: Sat Jul 23, 2011 7:04 am
Location: Victoria, Australia

jeff57 wrote:I am redesigning my garden for next year. I am going from multiple beds to a 30'x30' square garden. I am doing this to ease in soil additions, lessening grass clippings, ease in watering etc. I am also doing this because this years drought brought in a lot more groundhogs and rabbits seeking moisture out of my tomatoes. I wanted to build a cinder block wall around the garden. I wanted to use cinder blocks because of they can give me a good solid wall to ward off garden invaders, plus I could use the top of the wall as planting space for my herbs. I am worried about the wall blocking light and being detrimental to drainage if we were to get a big rain storm. My yard gets light for the majority of the day in the summer so I thought that the shade provided by the wall might be good for some plants. I also figured I could place some blocks perpendicular to the wall to provide some vertical growing spots. Any advice?
Hi jeff57, I was wondering if you have considered building your wall out of small square bales instead of building it out of cinder blocks, I imagine(but I mite be wrong) that using small square bales would be more efficient when it comes to drainage purposes over cinder blocks, and they should be effective in warding off garden invaders, plus small square bales should be a lot cheaper than cinder blocks and easer to build with.
I don't have any experience with groundhogs but I have a had a lot of experience with rabbits and I have found that small square bales do a very good job keeping the rabbits out. The only down side that I can see is that you will have to replace the wall every other year in order to keep it vermin proof. As for planting space on top of the wall when it comes to small square bales I have seen people plant in the bales but I haven't personally tried this so I can not vouch for it.
And lastly the small square bales are more of a rectangular shaped than square.
Nickolas

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rainbowgardener
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Joined: Sun Feb 15, 2009 6:04 pm
Location: TN/GA 7b

If you really want to use concrete block, perhaps get the kind with holes in the center:

https://cementcalculator.net/concrete-block-calculator

If you size it right, you should be able to get ones that are too small for rabbits (or lay a couple courses at the bottom of solid), but still let some light through. It would still cut down on the light, but not totally.



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