Keyhole Garden | Construction and DIY projects | Forums

Hi guys,

I've been lurking a bit lately, but wanted to show a project called a Keyhole Garden. The concept is to build the garden so that you can have easy access to all areas of the garden without moving around too much. Efficiency is the name of the game here.

There are versions of the keyhole garden that include a "compost tower" in the middle, with soil built up to the sides of the tower, sloping down. This concept is to compost in-place, when you dump your food scraps etc into the middle, and also to manage water flow, watering from the top of the slope, then building micro-climates of plants to take advantage of the different elevations and exposures. This version isn't what I was after.

My goal was to build a garden that looked great, but would also allow me to grow the flowers for my wedding in year 1, but convert it to a vegetable garden going forward. One criteria was that it had to have an aesthetic quality, or my fiancee wouldn't go for it. For this reason, we chose Wellington style landscaping bricks.

I've included the spreadsheet that I used to plan the materials purchases. This isn't the cheapest way to do this, but I'm in a 1/4 acre suburb lot, and don't have field stones or lots of logs/trees hanging around. I do, however, have a strong back and a pickup truck.

Step 1 - Basic excavation. Measured the 12' circle by planting a post in the center, and going around it with a twine and can of paint. Then used a spade to clear the sod. At this point, I should have cleared all of the sod, but I'll get into that later.

Step 2 - Gravel foundation - at least 4' deep all around 5/8' gravel. Take your time here, as having a good, deep foundation will make leveling the brick flights much easier.

Step 3 - First flight of bricks. - this is the most important flight, and will dictate the structural integrity and level-ness of your walls for the rest of the flights.