Stone circle revisited.

 

Last year we made some improvements to our main garden circle. Around the edge we have many half-moon shaped borders and the lawn bit in the middle kept spreading into them and made it very tedious to weed. So we decided to make a stone border all around the circle to combat that problem and get an edge that is easy to mow at the same time. You can read all about it here. It has worked very well apart from one small problem. After we set the stones in cement we used hypertufa as an infill between them. Sadly the mixture was not strong enough and over the year most of it has crumbled away.  Grass and weeds have taken hold between the stones. We needed to do something about this before the new growing season as the problem would have gotten completely out of hand.

We started by brushing as much loose hypertufa as possible away with a steel brush. After that we dug straight down around the edges to leave a space for wet concrete to build up the edge stronger and sturdier.

We applied concrete to the edges and to the fronts of the beds in some places where the hypertufa had crumbled away. We also put some around the back of our standing stones to make those areas easier to manage, with less weeds popping up. We will make a fine, dry cement mixture in a couple of days when the concrete has dried and brush it into all the cracks and crevices. After that it can be watered in and set and hopefully our problem will be sorted for many years to come. We will also apply a mix of mosses, yoghurt and sugar to the whole area to get moss growing fast in all the crevices.

We are so happy with our circle and we hope this improvement will significantly cut back on the time spent tending to it. With the concrete edge in place it will be easy to run our hand powered lawnmower around the circle, but we will probably need to use the grass strimmer a few times first to get the grass down to a manageable length. We like a wild garden and this circle along with the little circle in our herb garden, are the only places with short grass. It makes a nice contrast to all the wilder looking parts of the garden and we all like to spend some time on it in the summer, or all throughout the year in some cases.

Now we are dreaming about July and August, when the circle will hopefully look like in these pictures again, or maybe even better as the perennials have all grown bigger and more beautiful since last year. We will keep you posted.