If you like to get organized, you'll love raised bed gardening. I use raised beds almost exclusively, for 3 main reasons:
- Raised beds make the garden look orderly. (Mine is visible from the street, so this is an important factor.) Plus, the different planting spots are easily marked and remembered. Makes your crop easier to plan, place, and ultimately, to find!
- Raised beds create a framework to anchor season extenders, trellises and plant supports. On a wood frame, just screw in the hardware you need. On a concrete block frame, build around the outline or stick your anchors in the little holes in each block.
- Raised beds help you contain your soil-building mulches and amendments. Since my native soil is quite poor, this was my main reason for building raised beds in the first place. And it works great!
If you can use a circular saw, a drill, and a tape measure, you can do this yourself. Ready? Let's build!
|
Step 1 — building the frames. I have raised beds made out of two types of materials, concrete block and wood. For this example, we'll focus on building frames with wood. 4' by 8' is a good standard size. The frames in this picture are 3' by 16'. On longer frames like this, it's best to secure the middle so they don't bow out when filled. |
Garden supervisor Max keeps a watchful eye on the new bed layout. We ultimately spaced them a little farther apart. |
| Do not use commerically treated lumber for any bed in which you expect to grow food. Ideally, you would use cedar or another naturally decay-resistent wood. I used cedar for my first several beds. However as I added more frames, that became impractical due to cost. I switched to plain old pine 2 x 6's and treated them with an environmentally friendly mixture I concocted from a recipe found on the ATTRA website. |
Notice how the water beads up on this environmentally friendly home-treated wood. |
| You may be wondering about how to anchor the corners. Gardener's Supply has some great corner hardware that I've used and really like. As I added more beds, I figured out how to "cut corners" on the corners. Time will tell how my experiments hold up. In the picture above, you can see my very simple "stick two boards together and drive a couple screws" method. |
Here's a slightly more advanced strategy. Attach a length of 2 x 2 and screw both lengths to it. This picture also illustrates how to anchor a frame in place with rebar. Notice it's level! |
| Step 2 — filling the frames. Now that you've built and situated these great frames, the next obvious question is what to fill them with. Don't worry. It's simple and easy. |
What's under that tarp? Hint: I hope you're saving your extra fall leaves!
|
| First things first. You've gotta do something to block the weeds and grass you just put those frames on. Didn't I say this was easy? Just lay down some plain cardboard or several layers of newspaper. Over the course of your first season, the paper will decompose and add to the organic matter of your soil. |
Cover the whole bottom layer with cardboard or newspaper.
|
| Next, fill in the beds with your organic material of choice. We're going to compost in place. Include free or nearly free materials like leaves and straw. Pile high! For faster breakdown of your materials, also include some higher nitrogen items like aged manure, chem-free grass clippings, used coffee grounds, blood meal, or alfalfa pellets. Water between layers (or let M Nature do the job with rain). |
Almost ready!
|
| Ideally, you'd have a few weeks of warm weather to spare before planting. But this is the north! We plant as soon as humanly possible. Good news. You can transplant directly into the mixture (just clear out a little hole). For large-seeded vegetables like corn, beans, or squash, I like to put a couple scoops of homemade potting soil down, add the seed, and then cover lightly. For small-seeded crops like carrots, beets or herbs, I'd wait until the second year. |
The bed this garlic's coming up in started freshly sheet-composted in spring 2007. In September, after harvesting the crop that had grown there, I dug it up (optional) to mix the compost and native soil and remove rocks. Then planted garlic and covered with straw mulch. This picture was taken May 26, 2008. See how happy everyone looks?
|
|
|
