The Great Wall Of Flagstone

Psst, if you follow me on facebook, twitter, or instagram, you might have noticed that my mom and I hit up the Big Apple over the weekend for a wedding-dress-slash-birthday-extravaganza! It was a lot of fun (productive too, wink)! Today, on my mom’s real 60th birthday, I think it’s akin of me to share a fun DIY project that she’d appreciate. Yard work makes mom especially proud.

The two flagstone pallets we ordered covered way more ground than we could have hoped for, and even after we finished both flagstone patios (seen here and here), we still had quite a few stones left in our driveway. Without the need for a third patio (come on), we decided to break the remaining stones up into manageable chunks and use them to form a barrier along the backside of our round patio space.

I think it turned out pretty great, but it is my brainchild.

You see, the 8″ of soil that we removed from the ground when prepping for the patios was tossed to onto the perimeter of the yard which we’ve been slowly transforming into established garden beds. We certainly needed more soil to plant in (and who really wants to buy plain dirt, is it just me, or is that not the most foolish thing ever?) so moving it from one place to another place made a lot of sense. All was good, until it rained, and a bunch of the loose soil filtered down onto our new flagstone patio. We swept it away and blah, blah, blah, the patio is fine and clean again, but to combat this potentially on-going spillage event, I spent the better part of one day moving excess soil to other garden beds in need, and then built the stacked flagstone wall to serve as a gardening barricade for future runoff.

There will always be some soil runoff (let’s face it, it’s a patio, outside, under a tree), but so far the wall has been an effective solution. Plus, it’s already proven to be a solid play surface with built in caves for lego men.

The stones are just stacked–not yet conjoined with adhesive or mortar–but if we decide that we need to reinforce it somehow, that’d be our plan of attack. It doesn’t feel the least big wobbly because we used bigger pieces both as a base and along the top, but we’ve already established that it is not. to. be. walked. on. by. kids. or. dogs. Note the “oops”: the neighbor’s dog photo bombed me by doing something… unmentionable. How embarrassing.

We even had just enough leftover stone to continue the wall in a smaller scale around the garden bed with the Mountain Laurel. If we had more flagstone, I’d have continued this design around the other garden beds in the yard; it’s pretty in person and adds a nice definition between the lush grass and the soil. Hopefully I can acquire more flagstone in the future.

Our little work in progress back corner of the yard will look much improved when I can get my hands on a round of mulch, maybe that’ll happen next spring. For now, we’re hoping to revive plant life in the new bed behind the patio, something rich with hostas and myrtle and other shade-loving greenery.

Happy Birthday Mom, sorry about the 500 weeds taunting you in these photos.