Raised Bed Gardening (part 1)

May 7, 2008 by dave.

I had a vegetable garden for about 3 years in a row but gave it up several years ago when I found I didn’t have time to maintain it. I also had gotten very frustrated with the weeding. I had lots of stuff other than the vegetables that wanted to grow in the location I had placed the garden and, though I did get vegetables, it was a mess.

Now that my kids are a little older and I have time to ‘get into another project’ I am starting another garden - but I’ve decided to change the location and go with a ‘raised bed‘ design. There’s a lot of information on doing gardens this way and I found the concept was something I wanted to try. It will enable me to control my garden better and if I find I like it I can add another one elsewhere in the yard.

As you can see, the raised bed consists of an L-shaped garden of about 80 square feet. The height is about 10 inches and I constructed it at almost no cost with wood that was destined to be bed parts for where I work….but the company that sent them made them the wrong size and told us to toss them in a dumpster. I rescued them and figured I’d have a use some day. I used vertical limber to tie it all together. The location of this is great for sunshine though at this point it looks a little odd from the road (I’m usually a but nutty about making sure the yard looks good so ‘lightening up’ a bit these days).

I also decided to line the bottom with permeable landscape fabric solely to keep anything else that was already growing in my yard out of the garden. I’m not sure if any of this is ’standard practice’ but we’ll see how this works. I’ve purchased organic garden soil and will combine that with a bit of peat moss and free compost from my local ‘dump’.

I hope to get the soil all set this weekend and will plant a few cold-weather tolerant vegetables (lettuce / spinach). I’ll plant the rest on the last weekend of May (traditional date for planting gardens in NH - to avoid ‘death by cold’). In addition to these vegetables I have cucumbers, carrots, and tomato plants. I know there isn’t an abundance of room for all these items but I’ll see how it works out. I picked up my seeds(and will soon receive the tomato plants) from burpee.com

Expect follow-up reports in the future to highlight how this project is going….

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