The Brew Cabin

Hi all -

I'm installing a mowing strip with edging in my front yard. I'm using 4" x 8" x 2 3/8" concrete bricks side-by-side for the mowing strip, and standing the same bricks on-end right behind the strip to use as edging.

I use a lawn tractor for mowing. I'm concerned that a sand bed won't be stout enough to take the weight of the mower, and will shift the bricks. I'd rather not resort to cementing it all because, well, it'd be a LOT of concrete! This yard is about 30 by 60 feet.

I'm not afraid to do some digging though, and my idea is this - take the same approach as a pavior walkway and make a foundation of compacted gravel (2-4 inches), another few inches of bedding sand, and lay my bricks on that. Could it work?

I'm in western Washington State, USA, and the weather is approximately like that of England. Snow can happen but is not common, and we don't get deep freezes. My soil is pretty normal - it isn't sandy or clay-like.

- Neil

depending on what type of sub grade u have ie firm or soft the best and quickest way would be to bed them into a 25-50mm concrete sorry about that if u want to dig down and fill with mot and wacker that then it would work but i would want around 100mm of mot and 25mm of sharp seems a lot more harder work than the concrete option though.

Suki is right, again - laying the bricks on sand and a sub-base may well prevent them settling downwards, but it offers no protection against lateral movement, and so, I think you'd find the blocks slipping, gradually, out of alignment.

From a workload point of view, I'd guess that laying the blocks on, say 50-75mm (2-3 of your old-fashioned inches) of concrete, is actually less work than excavating for, laying and compacting a sub-base of 100mm and then repeating the process with the sand bedding.