I'm in awe at your lugging around multiple bags of concrete. My heavy lifting goes in to bringing home bags of dried manure for soil-making. And wheelbarrowing clay or soil around.
>> I wonder if they would be more stable if you were able to bury them into the soil a few inches?
Maybe, but I would expect them to snap if the soil shfted and put much weight on them. I had expected the weight of the pavers to make them sink into the soil over years, but HAH! With my clay, it would take a sledgehammer to make anything "sink" into that clay!
When they built this park, they must have bulldozed off every crumb of soil that was softer than a rock.
Leaning the pavers inwards works fine for me, except that they do move slightly and get messy over a few years. When I remember, I even them up by:
1. tilt one out a few degrees and pour some soil down the crack, then pat it back into place
2. tap the paver with a 2x4, or lay the 2x4 flat on the paver & tap that with a mallet
I think a little concrete glue would fix them solidly in place, but then I couldn't re-size or move a bed on a whim.
For the very first bed I made, I thought for some reason that I had to anchor the pavers deep. So I sank one row deep using pick and shovel, then used that as a footing for another row. Total waste of effort.
For a while I did something similar on an upper bed, but that also served no purpose. Right now every wall except that first one is just one row sitting on clay. 8" tall, 12" tall or 16" tall.
Well, in some cases digging the clay DOWN was too much work when leveling pavers, so instead I used pebbles to prop half of each paver UP to level it. I don't have any photos of those, but I'll see what I can do to get them.
