A roof garden serves as a green space at your home and to minimize the sun heat which enters the building as well. The temperature decrease inside the room is due to the sunlight which is not directly received by the building interior. There are four things must be considered when designing a roof garden.
- Structure. The calculated structure is the total weight of the materials used for the garden.
- Drainage. Ideally, the number of drainage point is 1 in every 3 meters, with a 10 cm pipe diameter and at a slope of 30. To avoid any clogged pipe, add a floor drain on it.
- Types of plants. Choose plants that do not have a lot of roots and leaves so that they are easy to take care. Those plants such as shrubs and bulrush are suitable to be planted on the roof garden. Creeping plants are also a good choice as long as you monitor the growth regularly to make sure that they grow properly.
- Accessibility. Besides serves as a circulation path, it can also be used as access to lift up things such as plants, natural stones, etc. The minimum wide of the stairs is 75 cm with a step distance of no more than 20 cm.
Then, how to make the roof garden? Here are the steps. First, make sure that the concrete roof is in a good condition and is ready for a heavy load. Then, add a waterproofing layer to avoid any leak. Arrange bricks in rows with a 3 cm distance between the bricks. This distance functions to ease water circulation to the drain. Once you have done that, install a sub base of 5 cm thick to sift the soil so that it won’t enter the drain. Next, seal the sub base with sand of 2 cm thick evenly. Add a mixture of red soil which has been mixed with compost of 7-10cm thick on the sand. Finally, you just need to plant various plants you like there.
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