We bought it last summer for about $20 at Home Depot. It lived in a larger container until we put it in the ground last weekend. We didn’t get many blueberries last year, but the ones we did pick were big and juicy. There are about 5 five times more buds on the branches this year, so we’re expecting a bumper crop. Blueberry bushes don’t grow fast, but they produce more fruit every year and can grow up to about 5 feet high.

We dug a hole, filled it with organic soil and some fertilizer and moved the bush from the container to the ground. The roots didn’t go deep. We’re not concerned about lead getting into the fruit through the soil because anything that has bark on it, like a fruit tree or this kind of bush, filters out the lead before it can make it into the fruit. We hope.

And I need a new camera. The white balance on this camera doesn’t work. All the whites are blown out.

We bought 4 planks of untreated knotty pine, 1 inch thick, 12 inches high, 8 feet long. $12 per plank. (2-inch planks are better, but at more than twice the cost, we said no thanks.) We found a piece of 2 x 2 lumber in the shed (basically a square pole) and cut it into 4 pieces, each piece about 14 inches long — they would become the corner posts. We bought a 100-pack of untreated screws (photo). Then using a power drill with a screw driver attachment instead of a drill (our drill isn’t designed for this), we screwed together the garden bed frame one corner at a time. We had no drawings, no measurements. We pieced it all together first, then carefully held each piece in place as we drilled in each screw, 2 screws for every plank end we had to attached to the little poles in the corner. It’s the first thing either of us has ever built. It took about 90 minutes. (We haven’t included blueprints for the raised bed because we didn’t use any, and it’s easy to see what we did by looking at the photos.)

Click image to view all photos of our raised vegetable garden bed from 2009.

We then cut up some thick plastic that was left over from when we had a couch delivered a while back and spread it down on the ground and placed the frame over the plastic. We could have used cardboard boxes, too, but cardboard eventually rots and we want to keep whatever lead may be in the soil down in the soil, away from the veggies. (Not necessary if you know you have safe soil underneath.)

Total cost: About a $50 (Canadian).

Next up: Filling a Raised Garden Bed with some good composted soil.

Why build a raised vegetable garden bed? With a field full of lead, what else can we do?

And so it all begins with a field full of lead…