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I am planning to build raised beds with stones, when you walk into lowes, there are several varieties to choose from, is there a safe one, which no chemicals etc. Anyone else built raised beds from types of stones/bricks/pavers which are considered safe ?
Lowe's and other Garden Centers sell jillions of them across the country every year and no one yet has ever had a chemical problem. Now if you should drop one on your head or toe that's a different story.
Lowe's and other Garden Centers sell jillions of them across the country every year and no one yet has ever had a chemical problem. Now if you should drop one on your head or toe that's a different story.
frankly, the gov't could do more in alerting people to this danger with more Public Service Announcements such as this...
Don't you have any rocks in your soil somewhere? May as well stack them up and use them for your garden if you can.
I had several raised bed gardens made from stacked rocks, they worked okay, although centipedes loved the stones, too. We live in a rural area with occasional rockfalls onto the road. It was almost a public service to remove the rocks and they made a great garden.
Lining the garden with weed mat kept the weeds from coming in through the rocks and mondo grass planted in the crevices on the outside gave it a nice green mossy/grassy look. Although that was one of the main reasons for the weed mat, otherwise it would have been a mondo grass garden.
When stacking rocks, make a line of bigger rocks on the bottom, then when placing the next layer, have each new rock sit on two lower rocks. One rock on one rock doesn't work so well, but one rock sitting on two rocks makes a nice fairly solid wall. Also backfilling with the garden soil as you go higher keeps the wall steady.
The current raised bed garden is made with concrete blocks. It was a lot easier to construct. The CMU's (Concrete Masonry Units) are made locally out of cement, sand and fine gravel. I'm guessing there's not a lot of odd chemicals added to the local bricks because that would be an added cost to ship it in, but I've never asked.
Another option would be to make the bricks yourself, then you'd know what's in them. I used to make garden steps and walls that way. I'd take a 2' x 16" wooden square made of 2" x 4" lumber as the mold, but you can make them any size you like. Two of the joints were screwed together so it could be taken off easy, although any other method you can think of would also work, most likely.
2' x 16" x 3.5" 'bricks' are pretty heavy, so I'd usually build them so they'd be in place when they were tipped up on edge. I'd put down a layer of mortar sand (around here that's a nice dark coarse material), then I'd put a big monstera leaf on it and then pour concrete on it. That was one part cement with two parts sand and three parts gravel mixed with water. There's those bags of Quick-Crete but they were much more expensive than just concrete, sand and gravel.
You can mix concrete stain into it, but I'm not sure what sort of chemicals those are, although there may be some clay dust or something that would be a natural stain.
They're pretty durable, too. Once you've got them made, they could even be heirlooms since they last that long.
There were some taller ones which were set behind a short fence post driven into the ground to keep them from falling forward. Had I been thinking, I would have gotten some rebar and cast them into the blocks but so that about a foot of rebar would stick out as 'feet' for the blocks. Probably two or three 'feet' and they could fit thru a hole in the wooden molds so that would hold them in place. There was a bit of quarter-round molding at the lower edges of the concrete mold so that made a nice edge in the cast blocks. Concrete is fun stuff, you can make it into all kinds of shapes. Since we got the concrete in a 90# bag and the rest of the sand and gravel from the quarry, it wasn't even expensive.
Making bricks for your garden would be more work to build, but you'd only have to do it once.
If you read closely , most of bricks and stones ate chemically treated....Just worries me when I read what is added to make them last long...
Plenty of stone businesses sell stone that I doubt are treated...they are for home or garden bed construction.
Plenty of people use treated creosote rail ties...
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