Raised Garden Bed With Brick Paths = My Brain Hurts!

(c) 2011 Ms. Huis Herself at musenmutter.blogspot.com

Mr. Kluges and I want to tidy up our rather messy garden. You see, the only spot sunny enough for a garden is right in the front yard. Granted, it's not the middle section, but still it's very visible & public. While I was pretty decent about keeping it relatively weeded, it still looked untidy.

So we decided we should put in raised beds, with lovely brick paths in-between.

(Yes, it's gonna be a lot of work; no, I'm not sure how happy my left wrist will be with much shoveling; because it's going to look so nice!)

We've got a bunch of bricks in the backyard that Mr. Kluges purchased off Craigslist last year, which should be enough (but my job after typing this is to figure that out for certain). But since cutting bricks is no fun & I think they don't look very nice, we need to take Mr. Kluges's plan and convert it into dimensions that work with the actual size of the bricks & pattern we want to use.

Plus, he really wants the paths to be 36" wide. But the bricks are 8" long by almost 4" wide. Which doesn't exactly work out. Unless you put two bricks on their edges as borders since they are about 2" that way. So if we do a basketweave pattern, with borders, we can get 36".

But his plan isn't just one simple straight path, or even a cross of paths.

No, it's a center long rectangular raised bed, with four L-shaped beds around it, and the paths go between them all.

Now, my brain & his brain do NOT work the same way, particularly in regards to spatial things. We do NOT move furniture well together & likely never will! So, today we laid out some of the brick in the planned pattern & tried to figure out the exact math of it all, to reduce/eliminate cutting.

That helped, but I ended up coming inside & working it all out on the computer. Powerpoint may not be designed to do garden planning, but hey, sometimes you gotta use the tools you have/know.

Even so, my brain hurts. :) But here's some of the progression of figuring out what is basically one-quarter of the garden, which gives us all the info we need.

Now we can start measuring it out, and shoveling once the ground's all thawed!!!

Hooray!!!!