Tuesday 4 September 2012

Clearing the Grass, Building the Beds!

Well, we spent a good couple of weeks getting these fantastic raised garden beds made!

The soil here is clay, it has a decent 10-20cm topsoil layer, but boy is it waterlogged during winter!

So we decided to build raised garden beds for better drainage, and they just look so much better than having a hole in the grass!

We overturned the grass, and built a path down one side with some leftover bricks that were scattered around the property.


We used 200x50 H4 pine to build them, and put polythene around the inner edges to prevent any minimal chemical residue (most sites say its safe & wouldn't have any residue, but we just wanted to be safe!). We chose that size wood, mainly because it was on special & cheaper than the 150x50! Also we chose the treated over macrocarpa for the longivity of it. Macrocarpa looks fantastic, but its more expensive & you'll have to replace it at some point within the next 10years. I can't guarantee that I'll have any money to do that! lol

We built 4 boxes which are 2.7m long & 1.4m wide. This is the area I was allowed to use (as my hubby was very strict on not encroaching on his valuable cricket pitch!) & I just divided it into four reasonable sized beds that worked in with the lengths of wood I could get. The only thing I made sure of was being able to reach the middle from each side.

They look fantastic & luckily we had just dug out some soil elsewhere on the property so we could top each box up with it. I thought after putting the compost & manure I'd ordered in, it would make it significantly higher but fully underestimated that one! We added 4 bags of 55L - 2 manure, 2 compost & it hardly lifted the level at all! I guess it will just have to be one of those 'over time' things! Eventually I'll pave in between them and down the other side as we collect more bricks! :)



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