500 Bricks & 600 lbs. of Sand

The garden in the summer when it's hot.

Maybe one clue to "improvements" that are destined for the debris-heap is their lack of being photographed. Take Coat Hanger Valley for example. I have nary a single photo of what it looked like before I started clearing it out. Same with the raised garden in the backyard. Of all the photos I took of this place when we were buying it -- and I sought to catalogue all the splendor of the property -- there is none of this garden area.

Only when Shari sewed a fabric shade for the anti-varmint cage did the diagonally-placed garden merit a digital snap.

This garden was poorly placed for any number of reasons. In winter and much of spring and autumn -- when vegetable gardens grow best here -- it was in shade from the house. Then there was something Ma & Pa Kettle about a caged-in vegetable garden in an otherwise formal-like backyard by the cement pond. Plus, its diagonal orientation took up space and made clutter without offering much in return.

The garden in the winter when it's not.

A clue was dug up during an annual ploughing of the soil (mostly to trim back the pervasive oleander roots). It was an old and hard tree stump, much too stout to have been dug up in prior years, but rotted and frail by the time I found it. Its removal left a huge hole in the soil. There must have been an ornamental tree there when the backyard was bricked in, and I suspect they built the diagonal, cinder-block defined garden to accommodate the tree. Then the tree either passed over to the great forest in the sky, or it was felled as punishment for littering into the swimming pool.

As alluded to in the previous Chicken & Egg Project post, the diagonal garden was slated for demolition and recycling: cinder blocks for terraced, retaining walls; bricks for outside seating and stepping areas; and soil for the new garden (the subject of future posts).

New brickwork nearing completion. Observe the change
in direction, a border between two different sized bricks,
a limitation imposed by the brickwork we inherited.

This past weekend, the site was leveled, its remaining rich soil trodden down (pity, but I can only haul so much dirt) and shaped, and sand and bricks slowly grafted onto the existing brick patio matrix.

Did you know that not all brick pavers have the same dimensions? They look about the same, but when I bought eighty 48¢ Home Depot pavers and placed them to extend existing brick lines, I noticed they are about an eighth of an inch narrower. Over some twenty lines of bricks, that's a huge discrepancy. It turned out that the diagonal garden provided an interruption between the narrower bricks on two sides and the wider bricks on the other two. In all, I salvaged four different types of bricks.

I visited Wilford, a nearby local contractor cum brickyard. The old gentleman at the counter, probably the owner, immediately recognized the sample brick I brought in. "They haven't made those in years." Fortunately, there was a close enough match -- at about 67¢ a piece. I bought 100 bricks.

Looks like it was always this way.

The owner looked through his glass door at my Honda Fit and exclaimed, "You gonna take them in that car?" I did. No problem. Agamemnon Jetson is no ordinary car.

The next morning, I bought another 200 bricks -- using the Explorer. That afternoon, by when I could more easily count the remaining gaps, I bought another 120 bricks, then visited Home Depot for another 60 of the smaller pavers and my 9th through 11th bags of sand. Good thing I used the Explorer again. Smoke Ganesha is no ordinary car.

The site is level, allowing for the imperfections that are a natural part of the beauty of amateur laid brick patios, but there is one great depression, the bricks are too clay-red compared to the aged look of the old bricks, and many make a crunchy noise when you step on them. But the space is open and inviting, and I am tired. However, I have some bricks and sand left over.