Building, Growing, Cooking, Making, Preserving
Building, Growing, Cooking, Making, Preserving
One of our takeaways from our first year in the garden was that some of the vegetables we love to eat take up way too much space to grow in our raised garden beds efficiently. So we decided to build a sprawling bed outside the protection of our enclosed garden and run the risk of a visit from those pests we mentioned earlier.
Our raised beds are only 2.4mx1.2m so we wanted something substantially larger for our sprawling bed. We settled on a bed 2.4mx7.2m out in the driveway and running straight into the soil underneath rather than lined with plastic like our raised beds. This means the sleepers used in it’s construction can he shallower and are only 150mm in this case.
We knocked the frame together out of recycled sleepers we picked up locally that used to be a retaining wall. They needed a little cleaning up but still had a lot of life left in them. We decided to only enclose three sides of the bed and let the fall of the land make up the fourth side to promote adequate drainage.
Having tacked the sleepers together with landscaping screws we ordered three cubic meters of organic garden soil from the local landscaping yard and waited for it to be delivered.
We’ve been cultivating a pile of grass clippings over the last two years that have been very slowly composting and he barrowed these into the bottom of the bed over a layer of cardboard while waiting for the soil delivery.
The soil arrived and did it ever! The photo above is the full four cubic meters of soil from the local yard which we had delivered. We overordered to allow for the transplanting of a few of our fruit trees across from their pots into orchard bags.
We managed to transfer to bags eight of our fruit trees and two of our varieties of potatoes using that excess soil. We also discovered an unknown gold mine at the bottom of our grass clippings bay in the form of some truly excellent compost.
The prevailing wisdom on compost seems to be you want it to be moist enough to roll it into a ball but not moist enough that water seeps out if you squeeze it, so we put it to the test and it seems to fit the bill.
The plan this year is to plant an abundance of True Gold Corn into this new bed first and once the stalks are established past the height of the foliage the other plants will put off to add Musquee de Provence Pumpkins, Beauregard Sweet Potatoes and Molokai Purple Sweet Potatoes. We are looking forward to sharing how that goes.
Images from SeedFreaks and Green Harvest.
We really hope that you have enjoyed catching up on where we are at with our homesteading garden. And we hope you will continue to enjoy the articles that will follow! We have so much to share about the many facets of homesteading we are passionate and learning every day about; cooking, baking, brewing, fermenting, gardening, permaculture, livestock, building, spoon-carving, hand tools, blacksmithing, recycling, upcycling, solar power, automation and technology.