Establishing Our Raised Beds

 

When we first bought the land, we tried to establish a traditional garden which proved difficult for a number of reasons. For one, we didn’t live on the property, so maintenance was tough. We also had no direct way to irrigate during drought conditions. Lastly, we were competing against the farm itself that wanted to overtake the garden. I became pretty frustrated and kind of gave up on it by the end of the season. 

Raised beds established near the house just made sense to me. It solved a lot of the problems we were contending with before, but it also allowed me to become more strategic in terms of the long term plan for the garden. Before establishing the beds, these were my gardening goals:

• Expanding my repertoire from being a summer gardener raising the typical peppers, squash and tomatoes, to planting and harvesting throughout as much of the year as possible.
• Raised beds will easily enable us to create a plan for the garden to include companion planting and the ability to rotate crops to enhance the health of the soil. Some plants enhance nutrients in the soil where others consume nutrients so it’s important to understand the difference. As an example, we have beans and tomatoes planted in the same bed so that the beans add nitrogen back to what the tomatoes take out. Next year , we will not plant tomatoes where they are this year, etc. 
• Weed suppression - It’s a bit easier to control the weeds when the plants are contained in raised beds.
• Water drainage - Raised beds help with water drainage during the wetter parts of the year.
• Convenience of getting fresh produce from the garden directly into the house for washing, processing, etc. 
• Planting for pest control - More to come about this, but I wanted the ability to plant vegetables not in rows, but in a closer configuration allowing me to plant herbs amongst most of the vegetables. This is a way to attract good bugs and deter bad ones.
• Getting older! It’s so much easier to work in raised beds where I can sit on the side of the bed versus being on my knees or bent over. I wanted a garden that I can work in for the rest of my life. 

Please note: The raised bed garden is not yet complete. I still may add more beds. In fact, I’m pretty sure I want to add two small ones for chives and mint. The other adjustments we will eventually make include surrounding the garden with a fence and covering the paths with landscaping material and gravel. Currently, we have not yet had issues with animals getting into the garden, but when we establish our chickens, we will only want them in the garden at the very end of the season to perform clean up duty. If you are going to establish a garden like this, you don’t really know if you will want to expand, so giving yourself the flexibility to do so is helpful. 

As you can see, we started the beds while it was still cold and before the last frost in order to be ready for planting early spring plants.

In order to ensure the beds were spaced evenly and in line with one another, we used shims and string to help measure the space. We also used a level to ensure that the beds wouldn’t be sloped. The ground where they sit is not perfectly flat by any means. This meant building up lower sides with top soil. 

Here you can see the materials a bit better. We used 6x6 with bolts which connected each layer. You can see that we stacked the 6x6s a bit differently at each layer to ensure more strength. The 6x6s sit directly on the soil and have no bottoms, but more about that a little later. You can also see in the left hand corner where we are shimming that side to make it more level.

This isn’t the greatest portrayal of how we filled the raised beds, but when we were doing this, I didn’t know I would write a blog. You can see the pile of topsoil in the background. We also used what some people call “lasagna” bedding. I lined each of the beds with cardboard for weed suppression and then added a layer of compost, a layer of top soil and another layer of compost. At this point, we were concentrating on establishing the beds we needed for early spring planting while the others were put in place as the weather warmed.

 

In this picture above, you can see that we rented a small front end lift to help us shovel the top soil into the beds.

Pictured above, you can see our burn barrel to the side, but more importantly, you can see we used cattle fencing bent in half and buried in the dirt for climbing plants like beans and cucumbers.

Here you can see fence posts installed for the tomato stakes. I don’t recommend these to those who don’t have a tractor or a sumo wrestler to get them out when you want to move your tomatoes year over year. These are very hard to get back out of the ground once they are in, but you can’t beat their ability to hold up to even the largest of tomato plants. (We’ve used these for several years with great success.)

In this photo, you can see young tomatoes, herbs, beans and peppers getting established. More to come on the details in a future post.

Lastly, I’d like to give a shoutout to a book I read prior to building raised beds. It’s short and sweet, but full of great information.