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Saturday Morning Garden Blogging - Vol.19.48 - Building A Raised Bed Garden [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-12-02  

I have been working over several years to create a raised bed garden accessible from my kitchen door. The herbs went in first, just in little short enclosures, mostly just tilled compost into the existing soil and mounded it up a little.

the kitchen door is just out of frame to the left. I can grab whatever I want for cooking.

But the main vegetable space is slowly growing these 16-inch beds. It’s nearly complete now. (And perennial stuff on the fence lines all around.)

Tip for selecting your spacing: you should be able to get your favorite wheel barrow or other conveyance into the pathway between each set of beds. The wood is just common 2x8 timber, of whichever length works. The beds are 4 feet wide. On the west side, the beds are 16 feet long

on the east they are 8 feet long. For durability, my wood is treated with EcoWood, which will not hurt plant roots.

It colors the wood deeply, and weathers grayish brown.

The corners are purchased hardware from Gardener’s Supply catalog.

as you can see, they come in a wide variety of heights. Sixteen inches is a convenient height for me to sit on the edge while working, though I also have a garden stool. That means the 2x8s are stacked two high.

Here is an in-line connector with wood screwed in. It is desirable that the wood be flush with the connector at the top. The bottom, toward the ground, matters less. The boards should be tightly together.

The sixteen foot beds have these inline connectors in the middle, so they are actually two conjoined eight foot beds. (see below with chickens in one)

There is a cap for each corner that snugs in.

Filling these taller beds owes something to the concept of hugelkultur. Every conceivable source of organic matter goes in, starting with a layer of corrugated cardboard if I have enough saved up from shipping boxes. These raised beds will sequester a fair amount of carbon.

branches and twigs in quantity, lumber scraps, even small logs, can go in the lower layer. Chipped wood from prunings works well.

chicken manure to supply nitrogen.

and sometimes plain straw to fill up gaps.

a layer of native soil every so often is important for mineral nutrients and microorganisms.

and repeat layers until very full. Later in the spring, when the yellow dock was going bananas, some of my layers were entirely made of dock leaves. They pull a lot of nutrients from the subsoil, so the leaves make great compost.

purchased sand went into a couple of beds that I wanted to be fluffier.

only the very top layer is purchased raised bed soil. This gives the seeds a good start before they burrow their roots into the deep layers.

At some point in the process, the chickens like to contribute their efforts, especially if I have just added kitchen scraps to a layer. Their scrapping does help stuff break down.

[incidentally, that compost tumbler in the background? Worthless. Don’t waste your money.]

the white hoops are ¼ inch PVC pipe, held in place by pieces of rebar. The netting was acquired in very large rolls, advertised as deer netting, it’s ten feet wide, which leaves quite a bit on each side even after going up and over the hoops. It has to be VERY CAREFULLY pegged down, or some chicken WILL find a way to worm under it and scratch the $$#@# out of my seedlings.

After the first season, a very full bed is much lower. You can see the large pieces of wood are still largely intact, while everything else has rotted pretty well. Time to refill with more layers.

This time of year I can hope to get lots of leaves from friends and customers for topping up the beds, and the crop and weed waste (minus seeds) goes in, with more manure and a bit more native soil. Kitchen scraps too. Even bones after they have been cooked into bone broth, which makes them more crumbly.

Older beds need less topping up, as they have compacted over the years.​

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And that’s how I do it. How do you like to garden?

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