Finished my 42cu ft Inground Bog Garden. Thought I could get it done in a single weekend, ended up taking all my weekends for the month of October.

Its the end of the season so the plants are looking sad. My lawn on the edges of the garden died from being covered by soil, rocks, pond liners for a month, but it will grow back fast next year. My goals with making this bog was to move my plants so they can have more space and to do this as fast and cheap as possible. I failed on the fast part.

The only considerations I had when planting was keeping the short plants way from being shaded by the tall plants during the summer which means short plants towards the edges of the garden. Also there is a slope to the garden so I planted most of my moss and all my cranberries there to stabilize the soil and hopefully prevent runoff erosion there til I fill out a moss lawn.

I had banana trees in this plot that I want to keep alive and move elsewhere but the soil was garbage. There was a mix of construction waste, gravel, rocks, and clay. It was a struggle to dig out with a pickaxe and shovel, it took me 20 total hours for this part. I even found an excavator/skid steer tooth buried in there. Covered it with 20mil pond liner. I cut a 55 gal barrel in half then drilled holes into it so it can take up space, be a water reservoir and reduce my peat usage. Didn't care about going thick or having an underlayment, the soil was mostly clay after I dug up all the trash/rubble.

I spent 2 hours scrubbing and washing rocks and tossed it back into the bottom of the hole to take up space. Pointy rocks against the barrels and smooth river rocks could be against the pond liner.

Spent 4 hours hauling 200gals of rain water from by collection system in my backyard up a hill to this garden and I mixed the soil and rainwater with my foot like those people who mash grapes for wine with their foot.

Dumped a bunch of bags of perlite into the bog and mixed it in. I was going to use coarse sand but most of the people I contacted didn't even want to deal with anything less than 4 cu yds. I sourced perlite cheaper than the delivery fee/truck rental it would take for me to get sand so I went with perlite.

I did the hardscaping border in about 4 hours of digging, pouring sand, compacting it, putting pavers down, hammering them and checking the level. I didn't really take pictures of the pond liner edge details, but I basically just folded it and pinched it under the pavers then I pressed the liner against the paver and trimmed it as flush as I could get it and pressed it in place with the peat moss.

I made a sandy area of the bog but its going to be empty until next spring when I plant the Venus Fly Traps I have in doors that I'm currently skipping dormancy on.

Spent 2 hours digging up my container bog carefully and planting my plants into the bog and boom done.