Building A Terrace Garden

Need More Garden Space?

Do you have a hill or sloped area in your yard that you want to use for garden space but you don’t know how? In this post we’ll share how we turned this corner of our yard in to a functional terrace garden.

This photo is from fall 2019, I believe. By 2020 I was adding in more raised garden beds, every where I could squeeze one in. By the time I completely filled in the main garden area, I was looking elsewhere for space to add more beds. I thought this back corner of my yard, would be a great place for a terrace garden.

Why We Recommend Our Method

You’ll see what NOT to do, as we show you our first attempt, followed by what we ultimately upgraded to, as we collected more material. We HIGHLY recommend using concrete/ cinder blocks to very easily build terraced beds on a hill, for the following reasons:

• Concrete blocks are much more affordable than wood
• Concrete blocks will last longer in the garden than wood, which will ultimately rot over time.
• No power tools were needed to complete this terrace project.

Dreaming of Sunflower Hill

In 2020 I was expanding my main garden and I dreamed of having some beautiful flowers up on the hill behind my garden. It’s the NW corner of my property. I was envisioning beautiful, tall sunflowers growing there and creating an amazing backdrop for my vegetable garden.

Researching the Options

I began calling this area “Sunflower Hill”. I did a lot of searching on Pinterest for the best ways to build a terrace garden or gardening on a hill. I never really found anything that wasn’t going to be a ton of work or require heavy machinery. Except for one pin where someone had used landscape timbers.

Originally, I framed in the space with some extra landscape timbers I already had on hand. That was a bad idea. While I DID grow some beautiful flowers there that year, we also had a ton of rainfall. And with rainfall comes erosion. There was nothing to hold all my soil in place, so it continued to wash down in to my gravel pathway in the main garden. Ultimately, it made a big MESS!

After framing in the hill with landscape timbers, I had some left over landscape plastic so I framed in a small space at the top of the hill. This is the far West side of my yard. (the corner is the NW corner of the property). This area also got washed out, unfortunately.

THIS ULTIMATELY LED TO DISASTER

I’m trying to find the old photos to show how this entire hill completely washed out during the spring of 2021. It was very clear, the landscape timbers weren’t going to cut it. Even though I put a 2×2 bed at the base of the hill, thinking that would hold the soil in. It obviously did not!

In spring 2022, I had accumulated a bunch of concrete blocks from family, friends, Facebook Marketplace, Give Away sites and even purchased a few myself from Lowe’s and Home Depot. (they are actually quite affordable at just a few bucks each)

I decided I could build a tiered retaining wall of sorts, every few feet, to help hold the soil in place, but also create individual beds that would allow me extra space for my vegetable growing, since I was trying to implement crop rotation and needed as many extra spaces as possible since I like growing “All The Things”!

How I Built Up The Terrace Garden

I did manage to build out our new and improved Terrace Garden or Sunflower Hill one week while Art was working. This was early on in our relationship and since we lived and worked an hour from each other, we really only saw each two or three weekends each month.

I put a lot of sweat equity into digging out that area and building up flat areas that I could firmly plant each cinder block into. I started at the bottom and worked my way up. I had shovels, soil, blocks, concrete caps (for the top) and my level. It was a TON of work, trying to make every single block sit level.

I did each (roughly) 2.5′ x 2.5′ section one evening at a time. It took me well over a week to complete because I am a perfectionist and I wanted to make sure each section was perfectly straight and perfectly flat. I know I could still make it a little better but ultimately I called it good enough!

That was the spring of 2022 so we have now used the new and improved terrace garden through 2 COMPLETE garden seasons. This year will be our third season and I think we are going to try to move one of our tomato trellises over there this year. We’ll keep posted on how they do.

Do you have a sloped hill in your yard? What types of ideas have you looked at?