Raised Beds

So this year I have had a strong urge to garden.  A couple years ago I created a couple raised garden beds on the property.  One was made of fieldstone and filled with equal parts topsoil and horse manure.  This bed has grown successful vegetables in both years I have had it.

 The other bed was built with old cinderblocks and small rectangular paving stones.  It was filled with a mix of compost, some topsoil and a ton of well rotted cow manure.  It has also done well, but because of the high concentration of manure water would bead on top of it instead of being absorbed.  Last fall I changed the bed by making it slightly bigger and taller with more cinderblocks.  I also changed the soil composition by adding some coarse topsoil and a top dressing on the asparagus portion of the bed of manure/clay mixture.  This significantly improved the water retention of the bed.

This spring after my green thumb urge I decided to extend my top raised bed, so I would have more space dedicated to vegetables.  The bed was previously 9’x 6’ and I have expanded it to 33’ x 10’. 

As shown above you can see where I marked out the new garden boundaries and the materials set off to the side.

In order to extend the garden I used flat pieces of shale, some low grade limestone and used cinderblocks.  I actually got all of these materials from my uncle.  The cinderblocks are from a basement he had to tear a wall out of and repair, and the shale from an addition he put on a cottage.  The small paving stones have been removed from the construction for a couple reasons: due to their size they had to be stacked and were easily moved around when you stepped on them and the frost was heaving them making the wall uneven.

The first thing I did was lay the front stone wall. Cardboard was placed on top of the grass along the path where I was going to lay the walls, with the stone placed on top of it after.  Because of the wind I would lay down a piece of cardboard and them, stone on top and repeat.  The purpose of it is to prevent the grass from growing up amongst the stone wall and on the inside.

This is a side view of the front wall, behind it you can see the old wall, it was taken down after the new one was built, and more dirt was added to maintain the soil level.

 After the front wall was built I started to strip the sod from the inside of where the garden was going to be.  I actually used some of the sod to increase the height of the wall where the ground starts to slope downwards. I wasn’t sure if I would have enough stone so before laying the wall at the bottom I placed some of the cut sod on top of the current lawn to get an extra 3” of height.  I did the same thing at the point where the old bed ended and the new extended one began.  My using the sod I only needed one row of cinderblocks instead of two rows.

The front wall is on the right, back wall started on the left and the separator wall just needs to go on the grass in front of those cinderblocks.

The back wall was then put in place, with cardboard underneath the cinderblocks.  The separator wall between the old and extended bed was once again the same except I used newspaper instead of cardboard, because it was easier to bend around the sides of the sod.

Finally after laying all but the bottom wall I started to work on the soil.  My soil here is a mix of silt and clay.  This makes it a very heavy soil that doesn’t drain very well, and is subsequently difficult to work with in wet conditions.  It also packs down and stays hard packed.  I dug up the entire bed with a shovel, turning it over so that I could expose the maximum amount of soil surface area to the sun to dry out.  I them began adding vast quantities of composted horse manure to the soil.  I started with the areas where I was transplanting the asparagus and rhubarb as they were going to be planted the earliest.  The manure was laid on top of the soil and then I dug it all over again to mix it in.   In total I added approx 60 x 5 gallon buckets of manure. 

With the addition of the manure the soil level increased slightly but still on to the level of the original raised bed, thus the wall I have separating them.  Before leveling out the soil I covered the inside of the shale/limestone wall with newspaper.  This served a dual purpose; first it keeps the dirt and weeds from coming through the cracks in the wall and any grass on the inside that might poke out past the cardboard, will be smothered by the paper.

Finally the last thing to do was lay the bottom wall, once again with cardboard and cinderblocks.  Now all that is left for the weather to get warmer to plant the rest of it.