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Yeah, that photo above showcases some stellar winter weather we were hit with while I was tackling the building part of this project…
Anyhoo! Welcome to the buildening of the raised bed which would not have been possible without a little bit of plannening as described in part one.
Assembly
Ok, I went into this with every intention of building this bed by myself with no help from Nick. Why? I don’t know…ego? I don’t have much in the way of carpentry experience, but I guess I thought I might be a prodigy. So I had Nick show me how to use his chop saw, then I tried to take care of the rest. I was feeling pretty great at the beginning as measuring and cutting was easy…
But then, it took me about 90 minutes to accomplish this:
And the best part about this was that I attached the wrong short piece to the big piece! I was obsessed with pilot holes, and winging it, and not using proper support while drilling, is this even the right drill bit… Ugh! Turns out I’m not a carpenter prodigy. After telling Nick all about my little adventure, he assured me there was a better way. So I caved and asked him if he would help me put the rest together. Of course, he’s always will to help. What a guy! Together, it took us about two hours, and I think it would have taken less time if he wasn’t teaching me things as we went along. I was so excited to finally be making progress that I didn’t stop to take pictures. But here’s the finished product!
What a bed! It’s an immensely satisfying feeling to watch something you sketched on paper become reality. But the work was far from finished…
The next step was to prep the interior of the bed. I kinda thought that the cover crops I planted last fall would die back during the winter. Turns out they were quite frost hardy (except for the fava beans), so I spent much of the spring up to this point doing the ole chop n’ drop as they grew too long. So my chosen method of prep was to pull everything up by the roots and till it in.
Not gonna lie. I got real sick of this pretty quick. While my weasel claw is a wonderful tool, I do find manual pulling and tilling to be tedious. Not to mention a bit rough on the body. So towards the end, I got a little lazy with it. (This ultimately resulted in some of the grasses growing back, but I’ve been diligent about pulling them as they come up, and they haven’t been a huge problem.) I was dying to move on to the next step of adding the dirt. And the more exciting thing for me was checking my purple bin to see if I was successful in creating usable compost.
Soil
Compost
You guys, I totally did it!!! Even though I knew theoretically how to make compost (did a whole lot of research for these posts), this is the first time I had actually produced results. How freakin cool! My only regret is that I didn’t have enough for the raised bed, so I did have to supplement with store bought compost. I wish I had taken a side by side comparison photo because it’s really interesting how much darker and richer my compost looked in comparison to the store bought stuff.
Peat Moss
I bought a very large bag of Sunshine Peat Moss because I felt in my gut that I needed it. I remember thinking that it would be great for adding fluff to my clay soil while also being able to retain moisture for my vegetable plants. Overall, I thought it would be a good thing to throw in the mix even though I had no basis for that line of thinking. So I recently looked up peat moss use in gardening to see if I was justified.
Turns out I wasn’t too far off. Not only does peat moss retain moisture, but it also releases it to plant roots as needed. It’s also great at holding on to nutrients that would otherwise be washed away during normal watering. So go me for splurging on a hunch!
Garden Soil
Lastly, I got a whole lot of Kellogg Garden Soil. The deciding factor on this purchase was that it was cheap (yay!) and I seemed to be having some decent results with another bag of Kellogg dirt I used in containers.
There wasn’t a whole lot of method to my madness in adding the soil to the raised beds. I would say I took an instinctive approach to this as well. I tilled a mixture of compost and peat moss in with the native soil first. I do still want to make some effort to rejuvenate the native soil for better future growing. I then started mixing in compost and garden soil. Finally I topped it all off with the remaining garden soil.
Final Results
So the total cost for this project came to about $245 (breakdown below). Which I think is quite a deal considering how well it turned out and how long it will last.
- Wood (pressure treated boards and wooden stakes): $115
- Metal (steel connector plates, wire, deck screws): $55
- Dirt (compost, peat moss, garden soil): $75
- Sense of accomplishment: PRICELESS!!!
And some of those supplies weren’t totally used up, so I can use them for other projects (future trellises, tomato cages, etc.).
Total time dedicated to building this: about 4 hours. That doesn’t include my 90 minute false start. In fact, we’re just going to forget about that. Cool? Cool.
Before
After
So there you go. I hope you enjoyed reading about this project. It ultimately was a lot of fun and full of learning. Coming soon: all about the planting!!!