A compass garden is a great way to divide a large vegetable bed into four parts to make it more manageable. You can also walk along/on top of a brick compass garden bed so it doesn’t restrict your walk ways.
We made eight rectangular vegetables beds in our new garden area this year and we had this large space between the chicken coop and the other beds that I wanted to put more vegetable beds in. But I wanted something more creative than another rectangular vegetable bed. When I ran into some stunning compass shaped garden beds on Pinterest I knew it was the solution I was looking for.
This part of our property needed a TON of work in order to make it a more usable space. We brought a skid steer in and leveled the area down as much as we could. The garden area is still a little slopped but not nearly as much as it was. We dug up a dirt platform to put the chicken coop up on so the garden area has a few levels. I absolutely love have all the different levels in the garden. It keeps things interesting.
To get as perfect of a circle as we could we used two sticks and a string to map out our circle on the ground. To do this we stuck one stick in the ground at the middle point of where we wanted the compass circle to be. Then we measured the string to be as long as we wanted the circle width to be. We tied the string around the stick in the ground and then tied the other stick on the open end. Then we carefuly dragged the stick around in the dirt to create an outline of our perfect circle. Then we laid the bricks on that line.
To stabilize the brick beds you will need to fill the inside of the compass garden with good garden soil and then fill the outside around our bricks with gravel. Or you could just cement them together brick by brick.
Gardens are really never finished, and ours is certainly not. Everything you see in these pictures is all new and were not here six months ago. We still need to bring in the finishing gravel. Extend the chicken run further, add a cucumber trellis, lay grass in the orchard and add a few more plants and mini asparagus beds. But we are pretty proud of the what we have done so far.
Before: Aril 2019 
After: July 2019
Ive been a beginner gardener for almost a decade and every year I learn a ton more. Then I forget half of it via winter and have to learn a bunch more the next year. You don’t have to be a great gardener to garden just be an enthusiastic one that doesn’t mind hard work. The more you put into your garden the more you get out.
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