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Concrete Border using Recycled Concrete

We are well in the middle of another summer project that has been on our list since last year. Do you remember when we created our vegetable garden area? And, we made a grand entrance to it by building a huge pergola in the front of the garden? Well, we found a bunch of shrubs on clearance at the end of the summer and decided to plant them around the picket fence. That is all the farther we got with that project. I’m not sure if we ran out of time or energy. Ha! Maybe it was both. Well, we are working on that landscaping project again and adding a concrete border using recycled concrete around the vegetable garden. And, I love how it’s turning out.

Concrete Border using Recycled Concrete

This project WILL GET DONE soon. Deb wants it done today, but it’s supposed to rain. So, if you are new here, we love using recycled concrete. I am not sure where these concrete pieces were from originally, but they were already around a patio at our old house that we owned years ago. Our friends bought the house from us and they ended up redoing that patio. So they asked us if we wanted those pieces because they know us well, as we always have a project.

We discussed what we were going to do for a border around this fence because we wanted to keep the cost down. Should we use landscaping timbers? Railroad ties? Large rocks? We even went as far as pricing actual concrete blocks for a border and decorative concrete. That was a NO FROM ME. The cost was going to be ridiculous even for us to do all of the work. So we decided to try to make our huge pallet of concrete work for us. It not only was free but it would also allow us to work on another project that was on our list for the summer, which was cleaning up the random piles from the woods.

Do you have random piles or are we the only ones?

I helped with this project but Deb did most of this work while I was working on something else. I only say that because I don’t want to take even a little bit of the credit as she did such a great job. She started by using the larger pieces that we would normally use as steps around our property on the sides of the pergola leveling them out with stone. She laid them flat rather than standing them on end which was such a great idea. Doing so actually gave the grand entrance an even grander appearance in my opinion. She then worked her way down the front of the fence, adding the smaller pieces of concrete.

We need to finish around the sides of the fence yet but we aren’t sure what we will do because we know we will run out of concrete. One option is to use field stone to finish off this project and gradually work down to that. But, we don’t know yet. Also, we debated on adding stone to this area so we never have to deal with it again or mulch. We think we are going to do mulch this year because we love the look of it. If we get sick of it in the future, we can always add stone at that time.