For many people, their gardens are their absolute price and joy. They will spend half of their lives out there tending to their plants and flowers and making them look at beautiful as possible. They will also look to customise their gardens to add style and structure. One such way of doing so is by adding a garden wall. These can be used to mark the boundaries of a garden, border a flower bed or even prevent erosion. Whilst getting the professionals in to build a wall over a metre high is probably necessary, you can quite easily try your hand at building a simple stone wall under that height. Here are a few tips on DIY garden walling.
The first thing that you need to do is to check with your local building inspector and council that you are actually allowed to build a wall in a certain spot that you have designated. Often the community will have codes that will restrict your plans so you need to check on this first.
You will next need to get about 300 lbs of stone for every two and a half cubic feet of wall that you build. The width of the wall need to be about a third the size of its height so that means building a three foot tall wall a foot wide.
The next thing that you need to do is to build yourself a small trench as a foundation. This needs to be at least a couple of inches wider than the wall on either side and about 6 inches deep. You can then fill in the trench with either cement of gravel.
Once you have managed to do this and get all of the necessary materials together you will then be able to get building your wall. You should look to put the biggest and flattest stones at the base of the wall and then build up the body with angular and medium sized stones.
When you get to the top of the wall you should have saved enough small but flat ones to top it all off. You should then use the remainder of all the smallest stones to tuck into any spaces left in the wall. You can also shape any stone if you find that it is not suitable by using a chisel and mallet.
These are just a few steps on making a stone wall for your garden.
