Creating the Veg Plot
February 2, 2009 10:00 pm Food RelatedThe first trauma was sorting out somewhere to put the plots, the back garden was all patio and grass so I need to set to digging.
We decided to make some raised beds, I used decking planks for this (I figured they were treated to last outside and they were on offer!) I used 3 per bed, saw one in half so you have two long sides and two half sides. I found that instead of going out with a plan to make a bed A x B in size it was easier to find the boards and just say 1 length by half a length which makes for less work cutting things to size! I’ve seen great raised beds made from old railway sleepers, scaffold boards and concrete fencing panels if you’ve got something to hand use that, think about how much effort it will be to make it and how long you want it to last too. In the long run it’s cheaper to get better materials and do it right first time (in the short term anything will do! I’ll let you know how long the decking lasts!).
To put in the raised beds I removed the turf (and stacked that in the corner of the garden (the grass will rot down and you’ll be left with Loam, brilliant top soil) then dug down a bit to see what the soil was like and to loosen the compacted soil so the plants roots can easily grow down into the soil. Hmmm this is where I hit the first problem, rubble! I dug out so many concrete blocks and bricks and rubbish that I was left with a huge hole in the ground with no soil to fill it.
So I dug another hole! I was putting in two raised beds so I thought if i started the second one I could use the soil from that to fill the first one. Again there was a lot of rubble and not that much soil, I had to go an buy some topsoil, compost and manure as well to top it up (and I thought with all that mixed in the solid would be okay!), but this left me with an even bigger second hole!
fortunately, as digging the holes had now taken nearly a month (getting out the rubble and taking it to the tip and only doing it on the weekends whilst still having some social life!) we had found a source of manure locally. Fortunately most of this was pretty well rotted so I just filled the hole with that and mixed it with the remaining soil. The texture of this was really different to the first bed and to be honest I think it probably is too much manure.
The great thing about having dug all these holes was that now with all the exposed soil the birds were loving it, digging around an eating well, what every they found, worms, seeds or bugs and as I was digging over winter as well I’m glad I was able to give them some extra food.
So there we go, two (slightly) raised beds ready for planting. The plan is to have 4 big ones (1 board by half a board) which we’ll plant veggies in rotation and one smaller one (half by half a board) which will have some fruit bushes, but as they took so long to dig the other ones will just have to wait.