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Garden height
Martin13
Posts: 1
Hello all - first post on this site, so here goes - I've got a small terraced house with accompanying garden (quite long and thin, probably 5m wide by 20m deep) and am thinking it woud be nice to raise the back garden by six inches to add a bit of a difference up from the patio. Any good thoughts on how to do this? Particularly:
1) Would I need to buy some kind of sheeting to protect the wooden boundary fence from rot? As presumably piling soil up against it, is not a terriby good idea...
2) Where's the best place to get the soil from to do it? And how much would I need?
3) Any potential pitfalls?
Thanks!
0
Posts
Hi Martin and Welcome
By my calculations (not always reliable I concede) you need about 7 tons of screened topsoil at between £20 - £40 per ton depending on quality, plus delivery - it'll come in Big Bags and you'll have to barrow it to where you want it.
Yes, you'll need to protect your fence from rotting - the best way would be to refence using concrete gravel boards at the base.
This is going to be a big and quite expensive job - there are other ways to diferentiate the garden from the patio - what about a bricked raised bed?
You'd have to have some sort of brick edging if you raised the garden anyway.
We're training an espalier pear a bit like a fence between our terrace and the garden.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Just be very careful that the soil level does not go above your damp proof course on the house, otherwise you will have major damp problems. As Dove says, if you raise it against the fence, then use concrete bottom panels. If you raise the level on your side of the fence, you are responsible in law for making sure there is no nuisance caused to your neighbour. This could be something as simple as excess water draining in their direction and flooding their shed/garage/ favourite plant.
You could put a couple of raised beds beyond the patio and then revert to the normal level behind that. It would have the advantage of not affecting the fences on either side and being much cheaper than raising the level of the whole garden.