Garden projects. Current job in Herefordshire, update #1.

Hi peoples. Huge apology’s for so little activity on here lately. It’s been a fair bit of panicking lately with the current situation in the UK. Being an asthmatic, I have now self isolated as many else have, but was advised to take 12 weeks off work which isn’t ideal, but is the correct thing to do. In the build up to this situation, I have been massively cautious at work with social distancing, and hand washing / sterilising, and glove wearing, so I didn’t take a huge amount of pictures, but here is the current update to our progress.

As you can see, this should be one big transformation. Unfortunately the weather was very much against us from the off. We started this job back in the first week in February, when we were still recovering from awful storms and floods. The ground was very saturated, and a handful of dry sunny days seamed to make no difference at all to the ground, but bad weather kept hitting us throughout the first few weeks. So the groundwork was slow, awkward, and messy. But we managed to make a good start on the paved area close to the house, so I will focus on that for this post. We started by installing the footings to take a 3 block big wall on the one side of the patio, as we needed to “cut and fill” the banked area to make a level surface for the patio area. This is situated where there is currently a huge pile of rubble, from a collapsed brick shed. So some digger work was needed to move this pile, and to excavate for the footings.

Once this was built, we used some of the huge pile of old bricks to fill the deeper areas of the patio, mainly against the wall we had just built. Then it was time to start the steps linking the house to this patio. Concrete footings, and block work again for every part of the construction that is underground, then we built the steps out of natural Hereford walling stone, laid on a 5 to 1 mortar mix. The mortar is always left proud of the stone, and scratched back the next day, to finish it off nice and neat. This is usually where most people go wrong. Trying to make a neat job of the mortar joints when wet can be very tricky, and usually end up with stains on the stonework, or bricks.

Next step was to backfill all of the paved area and the steps we had just finished with crushed stone. This stone is compacted using a wacker plate, and it’s important to get the hight of this correct, to allow for the thickness of the slabstone, and the mortar bed Underneath. The slabs are laid on a 6 to 1 sharp sand mortar mix (May me known as dust mix or concreting sand). Then it’s time to lay the paving.

Unfortunately we are a little further on than this, but I was unable to take more pictures, for reasons I’ve already explained. But I will post another update, as soon as possible. We have also worked on a few other areas of this project, including a large veg plot area using sleeper beds, and a heavy pruning on the woodland that had been left to go way to wild over the years. This gave us a rare cooking opportunity.

Any questions please feel free to ask, on any landscape construction query. As soon as I can get back to work, I will keep posting.

Thanks for the interest.