DIY – Building Raised Bed Garden Plots – Part 2
Filed Under: Do It Yourself, Organic Gardening on July 2, 2009
This is a continuation, or part 2, of a 2-part series. Click here to go back to the first part.
Now I’m back at the house looking at my garden-to-be and unloading lumber. Stupid layout…
I set to work re-digging some holes. I knew it would be futile to start from scratch and was too stubborn (red hair, remember) to run strings lines at this point, so I re-tooled the total plan in my head. Using the posts I’d already set, I could run a 4×12 foot garden box and would only come up short two 2×6 boards. I called Mike and reserved two more boards so he wouldn’t sell out of my size and finished digging the holes and setting the rest of the posts.
A few more cuts with the chainsaw later, some digging, some dirt tamping, and so forth, all of my posts were set and I was putting on the first of the side boards. That’s when I ran out of screws. Woops. I had nails (to hold the boards in place), but no screws (to make them stay in place). Oh well, I had to go to Mike’s again to get my other boards anyway.
So off to Mike’s and then back again. I finished off the side boards. This is pretty easy stuff, so a lengthy explanation is kind of pointless. The boards fit into place pretty easy. I cut the eight foot boards into halves for the end caps (short sides) and more halves for the extra four feet (12 feet total box size minus eight feet in board length means I need another four feet).
When I put the sides on, I staggered the boards and cut them as I went, instead of pre-cutting everything. This way if any of the lengths were a little goofy, I could compensate with a longer or shorter cut. So the short lengths on the length of the box are brick-stacked with longer lengths so no one seam goes from top to bottom. This ads strength.
I used outdoor screws (the gold zinced ones) to put the boards on permanently and then short cuts of plumber’s strap to strengthen the seams where the boards come together. On the corners, I used the corner brackets I mentioned earlier. You can see how one of the corners looks in the photo here.
You might also notice a time-lapse between when I first took photos and when I took the photos I’m using here. That’s because by the time I got back from Mike’s and started going on the box again, I was too peeved to keep taking pictures and had forgotten all about doing so.
In Goes the Dirt
Regardless, the box came out pretty well once it was done. On the next step, we filled in the box with soil and fertilizer. For this, we had a convenient mound of dirt from when the spring cleanup crew had come through the alley way behind our house and plowed up the alley’s edges to restore the drainage and get rid of the weeds. By (selectively) shoveling this into a wheelbarrow and then trucking it to the garden box, we were able to fill the box.
I got a truck load of manure from our animal shelter’s mules (that’s one of the manure-makers there, Xcalibur) and we mixed it with the soil as we put it into the garden box. For the very top layer, we used the potting soil we had left from our seed starting and bucket gardening endeavor. Once the buckets and containers were empty (the plants moved to the garden), we also emptied the soil from them into the bed too.
I promise that in a future article, I’ll go more in-depth into garden soils, what you need, how to test them, and so forth.
Fencing the Garden
Now that everything is in place, the plants have been moved, and the whole shebang looks finished, I started to experiment with my idea for removable fencing to keep varmints out of the garden. We have cats that are indoor-outdoor at our house, plus strays that come around because we feed them, and there are a ton of wild rabbits and critters in the area. So the garden needs protecting.
Putting a permanent fence around the raised beds, however, means we can’t get to them to work the garden. The goal is to keep the critters out, not ourselves, so a removable solution had to be designed.
My first idea was to put PVC pipes into the ground and use the four-foot t-posts we had just laying around. The problem with this plan is that holes have to be dug for the PVC and the pipes have to be kept clear of debris too. Since the beds are already above the ground, why not attach the pipes to the boards?
So that’s what I did. I cut the PVC into one foot lengths using a hand saw. I then used some more plumber’s strap to strap them onto the garden walls. The t-posts then slip inside the PVC and the chicken wire can be cut a little long, wrapped around the posts, tied on, and you’re done.
I’d like the wire to be a little tighter, so I’ll probably use some of that scrap lumber I mentioned earlier to create “tops” between the posts or cross bars to ad stability and pull everything tight. For a cheap and easy solution, though, it works great.
You can also see the soaker hose that we’ve got winding through the plants. That’s how we water the garden, the hose being permanently hooked up to our outdoor spigot on a splitter. We can turn it on and off at the splitter and run another hose for other uses without having to disconnect things.
I took an old garden hose that has seen better days, located the best length that was the right distance and in good enough shape, cut it, re-attached the fittings, and we’re using that. The soaker hose is one that was 50 feet originally, but our puppy had chewed it in half. I folded over and tied off the broken end and it was just about the right length to snake through the garden.
If you plan to put together your own raised garden beds, hopefully you’ve found this narrative of some use to you.
For the record, Xcaliber got his name because he has a big white X on his butt (over his flanks) as a sort of natural tatoo marking. Of the 23 mules at the shelter, he’s the most obstinate.