Mud Songs » Soil

Filling a Raised Garden Bed

Phillip — Mon, 11 May 2009 17:35:10 +0000

Our 8 x 8 raised garden bed, 12 inches high, holds about 64 cubic feet of soil, approximately 2,400 litres. We asked around about what kind of soil to use. One gardener told us to use nothing but “black earth” and peat. Another gardener told us topsoil and peat with lime. So we bought one 28-litre bag of peat (photo) and fifty 25-litre bags of topsoil (photo), some of it enriched with compost, at a cost of about $70. Hauling and emptying the bags was a drag, and it only filled about a third of the garden.

Then we spoke to a local organic farmer, Mike Rabinowitz, who told us all we need is composted soil and a 10-pound bag of lime. He gave us the lime for free and we bought 3 backhoe scoops of compost from a local contractor for $200, including delivery. We had to haul the rich, soft, dark compost from our driveway back to the garden with a wheelbarrow, which was a bit of work (mostly because the wheelbarrow had a hole in it and a flat tire), but the compost completely filled the garden bed and there was enough left over to fill in the first level of our potato tower (which we’ll get to later). The last step was to thoroughly mix 5 pounds of lime into the soil. Mike told us to add another 5 pounds next year, and that would be enough.

We won’t go into the planting process. It’s pretty basic. You draw a map (photo), put some seeds in the ground, cover them with soil and add water. We’ll post a more detailed but concise summary of the entire process, including dates for planting and harvesting some time in the fall. Until then, just check out our photo album once in a while.

UPDATE: Photos were added to the slideshow as the season progressed. There are now almost 200 photos in the our Garden (2009) photo album, most of them with descriptive captions, beginning on April 25th when we built the garden bed frame, ending 6 months later on October 24th when we sprinkled some lime over the soil and goodbye until next year.

How to Build Raised Garden Bed

Phillip — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:16:07 +0000

After discovering that the soil in our beautiful field is full of lead, we decided to build a raised garden bed. We searched YouTube for “How to build a raised garden bed” and found several instructional videos. We learned most importantly never to use pressure-treated wood. We don’t want any chemicals in our veggies. Besides that, there isn’t much to it. Just screw 4 planks of wood together in whatever shape works best. Use square wooden poles or metal braces in the corners to hold it all together. Here’s what we did:

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.

A Field Full of Lead

Phillip — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:47:10 +0000

We hoped to start up a vegetable garden in the big field behind our house this year (2009). Then we discovered the lead content in the soil is 460ppm, which is at least twice the amount considered safe for growing vegetables. We might plant some sunflowers in the field; sunflowers supposedly remove lead from soil. But what we really need is a backhoe, a bulldozer and 20 dump truck loads of 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…