Day 201 - Gabions

I love gabion walls. I have loved them for a long time and wanted to incorporate them into our house.

Originally the driveway was a lot narrower, and I was going to continue the gabions up the driveway,  but as the driveway is now a lot flatter (and a lot wider) than it was originally, we have decided to only have the gabions as a feature for the front gates (which will eventually be replaced with an electric sliding gate)

I had a bit of trouble sourcing gabion baskets when I started looking last year so I thought I would pass on all the information that I have since found out.

From what I have found, gabion baskets can be made from a range of materials.  The ones we bought are 4.5mm welded mesh, but they they can also be made out chicken wire (thicker than normal chicken wire I am sure)

Thankfully I found a gabion place on Ebay that was only just setting up.  David is the owner and he is very helpful and he responds to any questions with lightening speed.  He has prices on his website of any size gabion cage you could want.  If the size you need isnt there, he will give you a price pretty quickly.


I placed the order with Gabion1 on Tuesday and they were ready to be picked up Friday.  Another thing that I found handy with Gabion1 - he has made quite a lot of videos which are on YouTube of how to put them together and ideas on what to fill them with.

Our gabion baskets are 1200x1200x450mm and they are made out of 4.5mm mesh.  You can buy 3.0mm mesh from Gabion1 for half the price, but I thought seeing that they were going to be a stand alone basket I wanted the strongest mesh that I could get. The cost of our gabion baskets were $124.90 each.

The baskets come flat and you need to put them together. It is very easy and quick to do as per the video

We were originally going to fill them with river stones at the cost of $170m3, but thankfully the man at the landscape supply place suggested crushed concrete, which was only $68m3

As our gabion baskets were 1200x1200x450mm they should use about 0.68m3 of stone to fill.   As we thought we were filling with expensive stone, we decided to fill the inside of the basket with bricks first and them fill the outside with stone.   We had spare bricks from the house, and it would save some money.

The easiest way we found to fill them was to put in the bricks and then shovel in the crushed concrete. The holes in the mesh are 75mm wide, so you will get some rocks fall out.  Dont worry about this as all the rocks wont fall out and the ones that do you can put back in.

Keep filling with bricks and rocks until you get to the top and then you can secure the lid on the basket.

Even though the middle of our gabion basket is filled with bricks, we still managed to use 0.5m3 per basket - so they use more or the landscape supply store's bucket is not 0.5m3. In any case they were only $34.00 each to fill.

We have decided with ours that one side will be the letterbox with the numbers and the other side will be left as it is.

The letterbox, bought it off Ebay - cost $51.00 and the numbers are are on their way, at the cost of $97.00.

Now I am dreaming of gabion retaining walls - a lot more expensive than a treated pine retaining wall, but they look so good.