Soil level keeps rising above walkway

[Your Letters 2]

Can you discuss what to do about beds raising? After only 20 years our paver walkways are now 6” below the beds. Mulch breakdown is adding height I believe. I can either remove soil or raise pavers.

C.H.

[Janet Macunovich 32]

We do contribute to soil building with all our mulch. You can work at maintaining level beds all the time - removing some soil from the bottom of every planting hole, for instance, or lowering the area where you are dividing perennials . Alternatively, every ten years or so you can address it when you renovate the bed. Then you remove soil before planting, at least from the edge.

 

Of course you can install a curb to retain the soil but I am not in favor of curbs on walkways in snow country, I want to push snow freely, not against a curb... and not aganst a high bed edge, either.

 

We moved to our home three years ago and bed level was one of the first things we worked on. The beds here were probably mounded to begin with but had grown higher until there was a veritable cliff along the edge.

 

The lily of the valley bed along the front walk was one issue. (Left arrow.) Another was the bed along the foundaton, which had risen to where soil was lapping over the window ledge. (Right arrow.)

 

We took yards of soil out of both areas. We couldn't remove it all from around the tree in the bed but we did peel it down about 6" even there. Disposing of so much extra soil is a problem, so don't wait until your beds are this high. We used what we dug out to topdress the lawn, we gave a truckload to a neighbor, and still had two cubic yards left. We piled it in the back yard until we can figure what to do with it.

 

Here's a similar situation, a tree in a bed made as a berm and grown even higher...

 

Here it is after I finished removing plants, removing soil, peeling excess sol off the tree's base, repositioning roots and putting the  plants back in.

 

Ths midway view shows how much I lowered the bed.

 

All of this soil is now excess. (The hellebores are just waiting to go back in. The pile was a convenient place to stash them.)

 

If you want the low-down on what-all I did to the beech tree to lower that bed, tune in to our April 25, 2020 Weekend Walkabout webinar, "Planting Well, Even When the Roots are Wrong."