New front retaining wall

Yesterday I finished building a retaining wall for the front stretch of the garden, along the sidewalk. I really didn't NEED to do this job, but I have a masochistic fondness for digging and lifting rocks. Sort of the like the Stonehenge druids or the Pyramid builders. Something like that.



Tony and I spent a day collecting concrete and laying the first two rows, then I came back and built the rest very quickly. It's all made from reused concrete from a few places. When people replace sidewalks or rip out driveways (see depave.org), the concrete is usually thrown away.



Most builders take the pieces to concrete-specific drop sites, but I am skeptical of how it is reused. Regardless, the most-green thing to do with this concrete is reuse it nearby. The pieces are generally uniform in shape and thickness, and vary from almost too large to pick up to very small. In this case, I found a crew working about four blocks away who had removed a large portion of sidewalk and a driveway. I helped them load the pieces I wanted, and they delivered them all to the garden in their huge trailer.