This blog is to share the successes and failures of working around the house for someone with no aptitude for cooking, gardening, cleaning, decorating...you get the picture.
We live in the intermountain west in a house with a dry, rocky, sunny, yard. When we moved in, it was covered with 6-foot weeds. We haven't done much with it beside create a few beds and lessen the weeds somewhat. We have no secondary water, so plants can't be coddled here-they will have to survive snow, cold, heat, and dry conditions with no real soil to dig into. I wanted to replace the two old raised beds I threw together a few years ago with something a little more permanent and bigger. With a raised bed near the house, I can concentrate plants that need actual soil and watering in one place near the water faucet.
This is a long stretch of dirt that needs to be held in. For a retaining wall, I was looking for something eco-friendly (not a lot of new materials, small carbon footprint), tough, long-lasting, and cheap. Have I mentioned cheap? I've been looking at gabions for a long time, since we have a large number of rocks in the yard. Endless rocks, in fact. A gabion is a wire cage that holds material to basically make a rock (or whatever you are filling it with) wall without cement, or a stonemason. We've tried the "piled rock" way of making little rock walls here, but our astonishingly powerful weeds just colonize it in weeks. So. Gabions. Take a look on Pinterest and you will find loads of gabion links, but little real guidance on how to actually make them. I ended up making up my own pattern. With much trial and error, I ended up making a wire basket with a separate lid. My baskets were about 4' long, 6" wide, and 12" high. I added a cedar board on top so our little monkeys wouldn't get poked by wires and so they can double as seating. Are they perfect? No. Do they function and fulfill my requirements? Yep. And I ended up kinda liking them. Any questions about how I made them, let me know.
