Low Cost Paving Options

At Kebur we supply a vast range of paving from simple utility paving through to the most luxurious of premium natural stone options.  There are solutions to create an ultra modern garden with clean lines as well as more rugged looking paving suited to traditional cottage gardens.  With both natural stone paving and reconstituted stone there is a large choice and price range.  Here though we explore some of the reconstituted stone/concrete options on offer at the more budget end of the scale.  Some old tried and tested favourites produced by family run Sussex manufacturers Thakeham Tiles and some newer options that paving giants Bradstone have created in recent years.  All options are of around £20.00 per square metre or below showing that an attractive patio can still be created without it costing a fortune, an important consideration in the current economic climate.

Thakeham Flagstone Riven Edge
Flagstone Riven Edge Paving succesfully reproduces and captures the elegance of natural York stone.  The colours, surface textures and edge details have been carefully selected to suit the regional character of traditional gardens.  When purchased in the 7.3 square metre patio packs this paving represents excellent value at £20.41* per square metre.  The patio packs contain a mix of three sizes; 600×600, 600×300 and 300×300 meaning a simple random pattern can be followed in the style of classic stone flagging.  With the Vintage and Old Cotswold colours recently added to the range there are now five colours to choose from with Weathered Old York, York and Autumn the long established shades.  Circle features are also available.  For full details see the Kebur website

Thakeham Riven Edge, Old Cotswold

Thakeham Regency Ripple
Thakeham’s Regency Ripple Paving is a long established quality product and is truly versatile.  With its practical shallow riven surface, a wide range of colours and sizes, Regency Ripple Paving can be used to create almost any look you wish.  Choose Slate or Grey to create a modern contemporary feel, Red, Yellow or Stone for a more classical look or York for something more traditional.  With circles available to match it is easy to see why the Regency Ripple has long been a popular choice.  For mixed sizes the price is around £19.76* per square metre, but the 450×450 slabs are the best value at £3.30* each, that’s just £15.50* a square metre.  Full details on the Kebur website

Thakeham Regency Ripple, Yellow

Bradstone Weathered Riven
Bradstone Weathered Riven is a pressed paving with the look and feel of real weathered stone but for a fraction of the price (approx £20.35* sq mtr).  The natural look is further enhanced by the three different paving sizes which enable random laying and the edges gain that attractive fettled look when the paving is pointed. With flate edges this paving can also be butted up together though.  Choose from Autumn Cotswold or Weathered Cotswold colours.  Full details on the Kebur website.

Bradstone Weathered Riven, Autumn Cotswold

Bradstone Ashbourne
Bradstone Ashbourne is available in four distinctive shades, two different sized patio packs plus a circle option, Ashbourne incorporates riven paving and fettled edges to provide a truly distinctive and attractive solution.  The Ashbourne Paving patio packs work out at £19.20* per square metre, whilst the 1.8m diameter circle is superb value at just £80.50*.  The four colours are Antique Cotswold, Cotswold, York Brown and York Gold.  Full details on the Kebur website.

Bradstone Ashbourne, York Gold

*Please note the prices given are current at the time of writing and are subject to change.

Kebur Community Challenge Update

Today saw the announcement of the winners of this years Kebur Community Challenge as run by local radio station 96.4 Eagle.  This is the fourth consecutive year that the competition has run and out of 67 entrants this years lucky winners of the £2000 worth of landscaping materials is Cove School in Farnborough.  Their Gardening and Eco Club have been working hard in their spare time and wanted to build raised planters and vegetable beds that the whole school can benefit from but unfortunately didn’t have the financial resources or tools to achieve their plans as they describe in their application;

“I am a Geography teacher at Cove School and I supervise the Gardening and Eco Club. The club is a group of around 10 pupils aged 11- 14 who give up their Wednesday evenings to work extremely hard attempting to redevelop a small enclosed courtyard into a garden. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the area is covered with tatty concrete, garden tools are limited in number and quality and every improvement is being done on a tight budget of around 50p! Thus it is extremely slow, although enthusiastic progress. The perseverance of these pupils to create a garden for the benefit of the whole school is admirable. They have planned a vegetable patch and have grand designs for raised planters around the perimeter of the enclosed courtyard, of which two have been created out of recycled pallet wood. The aim is to create both a functional and attractive garden in the most environmentally friendly way possible. If Cove School were to win this competition, it would provide a facility to be enjoyed by the whole school and allow the grand visions of the pupils to be realised.”

Kebur MD Tony Lane explains the reasoning behind choosing Cove School Gardening and Eco Club as the lucky winners;  “we were very impressed by the efforts of the pupils and teachers in giving up their free time to improve an area that will be of benefit to the whole school.  We wanted to help show that hard work and dedication can have unexpected rewards, and perhaps help inspire a long term interest in landscaping.”  

Kebur has continually shown its commitment to the local community by assisting schools, clubs, societies and charities with their projects.  The most notable examples in recent years has been through the Kebur Community Challenge and below we look back at the previous winners:

2009 – Hawley Scout Group With their winnings they purchased a lot of fencing to close off an area so they could camp outside in safety, some rockery for climbing over as well as several other materials.

Kebur MD Tony Lane presents the prize to Hawley Scout Group, 2009

2010 – Ticehurst Nursing Home, Aldershot
With their winnings they re-vamped a woodland garden for their residents all of whom have some degree of dementia or are physically frail. Previously the garden was almost unusable but they created paths using goldpath self binding gravel so familys could push their relatives around the garden.  They also installed a garden arch and created attractive border beds using timber gravel boards.

Goldpath used at Ticehurst Nursing Home

Archway at Ticehurst Nursing Home

2011 – Change of Scene, Rowledge
Change of Scene provide educational, respite and leisure activities for disadvantaged and abused local children.  They seek to make a life-changing difference for the children who attend. They are  generally youngsters who are failing in main stream education but when given the opportunity to work in a natural, outdoor environment, absolutely excel.  They used their winnings to create a path between buildings constructed.  Previously the children had to walk through the mud to get from building to building. They used scalpings and sand for the base on which they laid Bradstone Woburn Rumbled Block Paving with a log egding.

Woburn Rumbled Path and Log Edging at Change of Scene

 

Make your own bed to grow your own veg

A local customer constructred these eye catching raised beds using the Grange Rounded Garden Sleepers and laid the paths in between using Bradstone Fossil Buff Natural Sandstone.

The rising cost of food, an increased awareness of what is going into our food and of our carbon footprint (food miles) and an active encouragement from celebrity chefs are all factors behind the growing trend of ‘grow your own’.

Now is the time of year that people are turning their attention to planning their crops and sewing seeds etc.  A great way to join the ‘grow your own’ revolution is to build your own raised vegetable beds and Kebur Garden Materials can supply all the materials you need to do this.

Raised Beds constructed from Reclaimed Railway Sleepers.

 

An attractive way to build raised beds is to use railway sleepers. This will give you a sturdy base that will last for years and the sleepers can be built up to make higher beds.  Kebur supply reclaimed sleepers, new oak sleepers, new softwood sleepers and rounded garden sleepers all of which are suitable.  Alternatively you can purchase timber gravel boards or decking boards or joists and join together using timber fixing spikes or posts. Kebur can also supply the Grange Fencing range of shallow raised beds that come in easy to handle flat packs that are simple to assemble.

To fill the beds Kebur supply a range of topsoils and compost.  The Norfolk Biodress, a mixture of high quality fertile Norfolk Loam and peat free compost is ideal for vegetable plots.

There are a number of advantages to growing your vegetables in raised beds:

• Creating areas of fertile, well draining soil where that is not already the case.
• Keeping plants organised.
• You are able to fill beds with plant specific soil mixtures meaning more success.
• Easy to access and manoeuvre around. As you don’t have to walk into the bed there is less mess from mud and also eradicates soil compaction from trampling which can reduce yields.
• Can be built to be quite high so less bending is required, so ideal for those who suffer with bad backs.
• Makes pest control easier.
• They can be attractively incorporated in landscape designs separated with paving and trellis etc.
• In raised beds the soil tends warm up easier than soil in the ground, which can allow for earlier planting.

Kebur's very own Jon McCann shows off his potato crop growing in a raised bed he made from reclaimed sleepers.

A bright start

There has been plenty going on this winter at Kebur Garden Materials.  Traditionally in our trade it is a quiet time of the year, but there has been a lot happening in our yard on Lynchford Lane in Farnborough, culminating in this, our first ever blog!

The weather has worked in the favour of the garden landscaping trade.  Other than the recent cold snap it has been a pretty mild winter with little rain and no snow (yet!).  This has meant there has been plenty of hours for landscapers and DIY enthusiasts alike to keep working outdoors.  January saw a period of strong winds which resulted in a huge demand for fencing, helping to get 2012 off to a fruitful start.  Lap panels continue to be the most popular choice and the Grange Professional Laps that we keep keep in stock are of a very high quality.

Lap Panels

We recently had some new pallet racking installed to house our decorative chippings.  It now holds more pallets than the old racking it replaced and virtually all of the racking in the yard has now been replaced over the last two years.  Last winter  new racking was put up to store the Bradstone Old Riven Paving, Thakeham Regency Paving and the coping and edging stones.

The Old Fir Tree Public House located at the front of our yard is undergoing major redevelopment.  Two new flats are going in and after several months they are nearly complete, along with a new office space downstairs.  Plans are afoot for a new outdoor show area at the front of the building to display much of the Bradstone Natural Stone Paving range.  Watch this space for further news!

Hopefully passers by on the A331 will notice some new signage that was put up this week.  It’s amazing how many people drive up and down this busy road each day and don’t know we are here, so hopefully the new signage will help solve this.

We recently welcomed new recruits Gavin and Charlie to our ranks and they have been kept busy working in the yard, especially in light of Mini Me’s little mis-hap last week when out on his push bike one evening, he had to break sharply and ended up going over the handle bars and breaking his arm in two places.  So we wish him a speedy recovery as do all the delivery drivers coming into our yard whom have to suffer longer waits being unloaded, because nobody is as quick as our Mini!

The days are starting to draw out now so hopefully more and more people will be turning their attentions to the garden once more.  We now have the new 2012 Bradstone and Stonemarket brochures in store and we look forward to welcoming everyone at Kebur Garden Materials.

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