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Another long overdue post coming at ya! But better late than never, right? I spent a lot of the winter planning and dreaming about all the growing projects I was going to tackle this summer. If you’re at all interested in what the heck I was thinking when putting together my raised bed vegetable garden, read on!
Design
Location: I’m pretty limited as far as location of my raised bed. And I knew this last year as I was thinking about vegetable gardening while I was laying sod. There’s really only two spots in my backyard that receive full sun. (Sadly, front and side yards are out of the question due to HOA rules. Those would have been great spots…) Both are against that house, but the plot I chose was bigger and near the water spigot.
Shape: The nice thing about planning out your own raised beds is that you can customized them however you want. While the typical rectangle may have worked ok in my space, I thought there might be a more optimal shape. So I came up with what I’m calling a jack-o-lantern smile! The indents allow me access to all parts of the bed which was important as an entire side is up against the house. I think this particular shape also adds a bit of visual interest and a natural layout for where to plant certain things. Assuming my math is correct, this should give me about 60 square feet of growing space.
I also decided that I needed at least 6 inches of height in order to bring in bagged dirt to have the best chance at successful growing. Because, ugh, my soil!
Trellises: Since my chosen garden spot isn’t huge, I thought it would also be fun to throw in some trellises for beans and squash to maximize the space. The bean trellis is pretty straight forward. It’s a simple 4′ tall panel that leans against the house. The beans should love it.
The squash trellis, however, is a little more complicated. (And I have no idea if it’ll actually work out the way I want it to. This is TBD even today.) It stand a little over 5′ tall in an “arch” shape. I planned for growing a few varieties of squash, and three of them (acorn, spaghetti, and butternut squashes) can theoretically be trained to grow upwards on a trellis. Underneath the trellis, I’d still have room to grow other things.
Prep
You’ll here me say it over and over until it stops being true… I have terrible soil. Super compact clay soil devoid of nutrients!
Last year, I planted up this area with cover crops in an effort to rejuvenate the soil and provide green compost the following spring. This also prevented too many weeds from sprouting and reclaiming the lawn we worked so hard to make beautiful and weed-free!
I put my purple compost bin on this spot with the intention of mixing in my winter compost results. And because my compost bins do not have a solid bottom, I figured why not let everything touch to ground while it broke down.
Materials
Wood
Choosing which type of wood to use was actually the most research intensive part of this project. Did it have to be wood? Not necessarily, but my aesthetic tends towards natural, rustic, cottagey…nothing too manufactured looking. So wood was the obvious choice.
Primarily, I needed a very weather resistant wood that can stand up to lots of moisture and temperature changes. Second, I wanted something pretty. I like neat and tidy looking gardens and wouldn’t be happy cobbling together whatever I could get my hands on. And lastly, I didn’t want to spend a ton of money.
Cedar comes highly recommended as it is naturally weather resistant and gorgeous. But it is not cheap. To make just the beds, it would have cost about $160. I didn’t even calculate the cost of making the trellises because the price on the stickers made me sad pretty quickly. So cedar was out. (I know that may not seem like a ton of money to some, but I couldn’t justify the price for a first time garden.)
I briefly looked at “common” wood at Home Depot which was the cheapest option. Less than $100 for all wood was pretty appealing. However, it didn’t look like it would last for more than a season, and it wasn’t particularly attractive.
So I eventually settled on pressure treated wood. It’s made to be weather and insect resistant for a very long time, not horrible to look at (honestly, it’s growing on me), and it’s quite cost effective. The total cost was $115. I read a lot about the chemicals used in pressure treating wood and whether there should be any concern about said chemicals affecting vegetable production (and their ultimate consumption). To summarize very briefly, the chemicals used in pressure treating are much safer than they used to be, although it’s certainly not anything you’d want to put in your cocktails. The scientific consensus seems to be that yes, there will be some leeching of chemicals into the soil. However, the amount is negligible. And if it were enough to bring you any harm in eating, it would long kill off your plants before it even made it in to your system. So with that, I felt fine about my choice.
Metal
I didn’t have to fret too much over metal choices. I needed cattle paneling or something similar for trellises and tomato cages and chicken wire for the vent cover. Cattle paneling was $40 for 60 sq ft (more than enough) and $7 for a roll of chicken wire. (Turns out I probably didn’t need the chicken wire, but it does make things look tidier somehow.)
Wood Chips
I used dye-free cedar wood chips to cover the garden beds last year, and planned on doing the same for the walking areas of the vegetable garden. This helps suppress weeds and make it look a little prettier. I think the cost was about $8 per 2 cubic feet.
River Rocks
And the final touch to aesthetically tie in the garden with the rest of the yard… MORE RIVER ROCKS! I still have a massive pile of these things, so they were free. Yay! I planned to use these as a decorative border in certain spots.
And in part two, I’ll talk about how it all came together!