Arico said:...
The soil we have is heavy clay. From the rescape so far (so digging out the beds and stairs etc) we already had about 30m³ of soil taken away in containers. What came out further down we just put in the half empty beds higher up.
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Think I'll just dig a bit out and mix the remaining soil with sharp sand and lots of compost. We didn't add anything for drainage since the bottoms aren't completely closed with concrete, we just made the foundations for the walls. So the beds are in contact with the underground.
That sounds a lot like my situation, but where you have tens of cubic meters, I have a few cubic yards or cubic meters. I also remove the worst clay and amend the rest with compost and sharp sand, grit, or chopped bark.
>> What came out further down we just put in the half empty beds higher up.
Did that mean your deep sub-soil drains better than the top layers of your soil? I keep digging deep in spots here and there in my yard,
hoping to find some subsoil with very coarse sand or fine grit (grains in the 1-3 mm range). Except for where prior owners started shrubs, my entire soil profile is nearly pure, heavy clay.
>> We didn't add anything for drainage since the bottoms aren't completely closed with concrete,
That also sounds like your subsoil does drain at least a little. (real estate salesmen here call that the "perk test" for "percolation"). If water doesn't drain out of a fairly deep hole overnight, the soil doesn't "perk".
My clay doesn't "perk", so each of my raised beds has a "floor" that slopes consistently down to one edge or one corner. From that edge or corner, I make sure water can escape under the concrete paving-stone walls into a trench, that slopes down to a point lower than the floor of the bed.
Luckily, my front yard has a grade down to slope that leads away from my yard and into a large area where my runoff already winds up. My trenches just get it there faster.
My back yard has a drainage problem and a high "water table" most of the year. I know where a long, deep trench would do a lot of good, but that runs through a neighbor's yard. Some year, I hope!
My beds look better after I've gone around with a trenching spade, a short length of 2x4 lumber, and a heavy mallet. I re-lean the paving stones that make up walls, so they are tidy and even, and tap their footings back into alignment. But they are still nowhere near as neat and pretty as yours.
Someone said she used
indoor paint plus a roller to paint her cinder-block wealls a dark sand color, which looked good in ehr yard. But she also said she watered down her indoor paint (with water) and used several layers of paint. "Watering paint" was a new idea to me! And using indoor paint outdoors seemed odd.
But that's what she said.
