Preparing New Raised Planting Beds

My new raised bed frames arrived from Natural Yards on Friday, just in time for the weekend. This year my garden supplies include two 4 x 4 raised bed frames, a 4 cubit foot bag of sphagnum moss, a 4 cubic foot bag of vermiculite, 1 bag of composted manure and two compost 50 gallon bins worth of composted yard clippings. I also purchased a 100 foot bolt of weed barrier cloth and 10 bags of rubber mulch. The rubber mulch is made from recycled materials and is supposed to last many years.

My soil recipe is 1 part compost, 1 part vermiculite, 1 part sphagnum, 1 part soil mix from last years garden and 1 shovel composted manure. To make it easy to mix, I added 1o shovels of my composted yard clippings, 10 shovels of vermiculite, 10 shovels of sphagnum, 1 shovel of composted manure, and 10 shovels of the mix from last year's garden. I put all of this into my wheelbarrow and mixed it in the wheel barrel. Then tipped it into my garden bed. It took four wheelbarrows per 4 x 4 bed.

The 4 x 4 beds have three feet in between each bed. I had enough soil-less mix for four beds. The trick in the plan is that I had to disassemble one half of my last year's bed which was a 4 x 8 foot bed, four boards high.

The first step my husband Brian and I did was to figure out how long the garden-bed row would be and then laid down the garden cloth. Then we removed the top two rows from last years bed.

We measured the distance from the farthest half of last year's bed to include a four foot bed, three feet space in between and then another four foot bed and three feet. So we started building the first new 4 x 4 bed ten feet away from where the near-side of the old bed that would remain. We had to leave the 4 x 8 bed intact until we assembled three beds so that it could hold the planting mixture.

Once the three beds were assembled, then I started mixing up this years planting mixture based on Mel's Mix from Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. I put four wheelbarrow's of mixture in each of the three beds. Then we scooped out one wheelbarrow of planting mix from last years bed and scooped all the mix from the half we were disassembling to the end that would remain. We began putting together the last of the five beds, but found that the ground needed to be leveled and we were running out of daylight so had to stop for the night.

One advantage of adding the planting mix from last year's garden into the new beds, was that some of the red wriggler worms I added to the bed last year were transplanted along with the planting mix. I was so encouraged to find the little guys. I wasn't seeing them at first. They had migrated over to the sides and bottom of the garden bed. I suspect they were seeking the warmth of the wooden frame. I was so happy to start seeing them as I digged a little deeper.

I hope to get the last bed in place today and to place the rubber mulch. I may hold off on the mulch because I think I may purchase some landscape edging to hold the mulch in place. I priced it on the Home Depot website last night. I looks like I will need 6 packs of edging which should run about $180. We bought the rubber mulch at Costco. It was about $20 a bag. That's pretty rich for my blood, but hoping it really will last as long as the claim! And I hope the ten bags will be enough. I think I will need to buy another bag of sphagnum peetmoss and vermiculite to finish filling the beds. Then I will be ready to plant. Yeah!

I haven't done the official talley but I estimate that I am at about $600 for this year's garden beds. The five beds will then have reached a cost of about $1000 - $1200. That sounds like a lot to me, however, these materials will last for many years. The planting mix from last year was still very usable this year. If you were able to find reclaimed lumber for your garden frames you could cut the cost in half.

We recently stayed at a lovely bed and breakfast near Herman, Missouri, Les Lavandes, where the owner, Myrta Webber, was able to acquire barn boards for free from a neighbor who was taking down an old barn on his property. The old weathered barn boards look great in their new life as a raised bed garden. Another example of a great reuse of materials. Remember the OurFriendlyEarth motto: reduce as much as possible, reuse as much as possible, and recycle as much of everything else as you can.

I expect to only be refreshing the mix each year with my own compost which is virtually free. We use a lawn service which uses only organic treatments for the lawn and we do not add any chemicals to the lawn ourselves. We water the garden with water from our rain barrles, so our garden is as close to organic as one can get in a suburban garden.

Gardens at Les Lavandes B&B

Buzz it up

New Plants in the Garden

I have had to find homes for some of my herbs outside of the raised bed. Since I first thought I had waited too late to buy vegetable plants, I bought herbs to fill my bed. Then, later finding some good plants at Home Depot, I bought vegetables too so my driveway flower bed has become home to basil, parsley, salad burnet, and rosemary.

The bed had been overrun with weeds and I had a losing battle getting rid of them. Brian and I basically shoveled of the top of the bed weeds and all and then backfilled with MiracleGro Organic Choice Garden Soil. Then I covered the soil with weed barrier cloth followed by an organic mulch.

To plant the herbs, I brushed back the mulch then, using scissors, I cut an "X" in the cloth, scooped back the soil and placed the plant. Next I pushed back the soil and then folded back the weed barrier around the base of the plant. The final step was to tuck the mulch in around the plant.

Most of the herb seedlings will need to be trimmed up to give the roots a chance to develop. The great thing about trimming the herbs back is that you get to eat the trimmings! I added basil, parsley and salad burnet to our dinner salad Friday night. The flavor was incredible. I am looking forward to more herbs as they grow. With all the basil plants that need trimming I will by some pine nuts next time I go to the grocery so that I can make some pesto sauce. Yum!

The raised bed was a pleasure to plant. The growing medium mix was easy to push back by hand. The best part is knowing I will never have to till this bed! Pictured below is the left side of garden. Left to right: Two tomatoes, cucumber, pepper, dill, zucchini, two more peppers.

Zucchini tucked into a 2' x 2' corner of the bed.



Right side of bed. Left to right starting at the top: two tomatoes, dill, rosemary, white eggplant,
three varieties of oregano, basil, purple eggplant.


Tomatoes in circular wire cages. Tomato on the left is an heirloom variety purchased at Home Depot. All the plants I purchased at Home Depot came in organic, biodegradable peat pots. No need to take the plants out of the pots which is healthier for the roots.


Two eggplants in the corner of the bed. The smaller one is a purple eggplant and the larger is a white eggplant. The herb on the left is a small-leaved basil and on the right is a rosemary.


I will add the varieties of each plant later to this post. The plants were rather stressed and root bound. I will research the best way to give them a boost organically and let you know what I find. They have definitely perked up now that they are sitting in rich garden soil. Next on the agenda is to get a soaker hose for the front herb bed and a timer. The timer is working very nicely in the raised bed. It is nice to know the bed is being watered at regular times no matter where I may be.

I also have to get creative again since I purchased seeds to plant and I need to find a place to plant them. I have three varieties of bush beans, okra, and cilantro.

I called Uncle Jim's Worm Farm yesterday since my red wrigglers had yet to arrive. Turns out they only ship on Mondays, so my worms ship tomorrow. I turned my compost bins yesterday and incorporated recent grass clippings and the dirt and weeds we raked off the driveway garden bed. The recent addition of manure last time I turned the compost really made a difference. I will be adding red wrigglers to the compost once they arrive. From what I read on Uncle Jim's site, I am hoping for even better composted results with the help of the worms. I will also be putting worms right into the raised bed where they can start creating nutrient rich castings to help feed my plants.

Another weekend has passed and the work week awaits. We had a great weekend in the garden. We also went to Knuckleheads Saturday night to see Leon Russell in concert. It was so nice to see Leon again! He puts on a fantastic show and his band is excellent. I can't remember a concert that just made me smile like Leon Russell's. Pure fun. Seeing Leon Russell in this small venue was a dream.

The opening band was a local group: Four Fried Chickens and a Coke. First time for us to see FFCC. We will plan to see them again. Good local band show.

If you are in KC and get the chance to go, Knuckleheads is a blast. It's an adventure just getting there. It is tucked back into the "east-bottoms" on the rail road tracks and sometimes the road in is blocked by a parked train. GPS comes in handy. You really wonder what the place will be like as you drive by the industrial area and trains, but once in the place you discover it is a little music paradise of a dive bar. They have received several awards and most recently the "Keepin' the Blues Alive 2008" award. I first experienced it when my daughter invited me to go with her and her girlfriends to see Cowboy Mouth. I was sure I had lost half my hearing the next day, but it was so much fun.

Today we spent more time at Oceans of Fun. It was like a mini-vacation this weekend. Gardening, blogging, concerts, swimming - weekends are my happy time.

Buzz it up

Growing mix is ready and waiting!

Compost Bins



On Saturday evening I lifted the bins from the compost and turned it out. The compost in one of the two bins wasn't nearly broken down enough. The second bin was better and close to becoming good compost, but still not quite ready. I went back to ACE and picked up two bags of composted cow manure ($3.21) to mix in with my home compost. We gathered up clippings my husband had been dumping under the lilac bushes then we layered the dryer compost, then forked in some manure and then a layer of the greener clippings and the more composted material. We continued the layers until both bins were full again, then I hooked up the hose and watered both bins well and recapped them.

When I went out late in the morning today and checked, the compost had really heated up. The bins were hot to the touch without being in direct sunlight. The spot I have them is on the west side of our garden shed so they don't get direct sun until after one or two in the afternoon. So, the yard waste that had been in the bins for two years making really, really slow progress is now on the way to becoming rich compost probably in a matter of three to four weeks.

My garden plot, just waiting for action!



I decided to call Suburban Lawn and Garden, a local nursery across town to see if they had vermiculite. Ace didn't carry it and the garden center a mile from home, Family Tree Nursery didn't have it either. When I called Suburban, I asked for someone who could give me advice on soil amendments which put me in contact with a fellow who was willing to listen and give me some really helpful advice.

He felt that 1/3 vermiculite was a bit too much so we did some mental math for the size of my garden and came up with the following combination: ten 2 cubic feet bags of Back to Earth Cotton Burr Compost ($49.90), two 3.8 cubic feet bags of Canadian Sphagnum Peat ($27.98) and one 4 cubic feet bag of vermiculite ($16.99). I also bought a 3' x 50' garden weed barrier cloth ($19.99). It's a lot more cloth than I need for my single bed, but the next smaller size, 3' x 20' was $12.99 so it was a better value and I will use it on other flower beds around the yard with plenty to spare for the addition of another 4' x 8' bed I will most likely add next year or maybe even this fall.

The current accounting

My total for growing mix and the two bags of manure I layered in with my compost, the garden frame from Natural Yards, (I bought the economy boards which may come with some less than perfect but still durable boards, and it saved me 15%), is $577.13. About $80 more than I had estimated for the bed with growing mix.



To recap, the garden frame is untreated cedar and is 4' width x 8' length x 22" high and will have 32 cubic of soil mix. This is less than the actual volume that the frame could hold,but looking at the stack of bags waiting out by the garden, it looks like it ought to do the job. I have another 24 cubic feet of homemade compost cooking in the bins which will be added later and once I have the plants in place I will be top dressing with mulch.

The garden frames come in heights of 5.5" increments. The main reason I went with a four-layer frame was to gain enough height to discourage my two faithful Basset hounds from jumping into the bed and digging around. Max, the "big dog" of the two, has already enjoyed helping me dig up the weeds to prepare the bed. He had a great time!



Michelle is the female half of the Basset duo. She is not as interested in digging at this point.



Max is 6 years old and Michelle is his 2 year old child bride. They are quite a pair.



What still needs to be purchased

I still have the soaker hose and of course, the veggies to purchase. I also need mulch and a can of worms. That's right! Good ol' night crawlers. The associate that helped me at Suburban told me they had no worms, but I could buy composted worm castings. I told him I want my own live wormy pets in the garden! You have to add worms because the weed shield cloth that will be placed under the frame and growing medium will keep worms out as well as weeds. A quart bucket of worms introduced into the garden will provide perpetual worm casting which is great fertilizer for the garden. The worms will multiply and make their happy home and nourish the garden bed as well. The fellow at Suburban Lawn and Gardens told me to try a fish bait shop.

I am paying for this from my paycheck, but my husband was curious as to whether I had compared the cost of prospective produce from the garden to what we may spend at the market. Honestly, this year, I will be lucky to break even but there are all the other intrinsic values to count such as the known therapeutic benefits (I have a high-paced, stressful job...I need this! At $100 per counseling session this is a bargain, right!) and the better ability to deal with our yard and kitchen waste. Plus the experience I will have learning about gardening and then sharing all of that with you, my readers. Next year I won't have the same start up costs, unless I add a second bed. If the dogs are good and stay out of the garden, I may be able to simply break my current bed into two 11" high beds. I checked with Natural Yards and they will be able to sell me a second set of steel pins which are used to hold the bed frames together.

I knew this would not be the cheapest way to garden, but with my work schedule of 48 plus hours per week, I need a gardening method that promotes simplicity. Although preparing the bed was a bit of work, I didn't have to rent a tiller. The raised beds are supposed to make caring for the garden much easier. Hunting down the growing mix components took some doing and luckily I have a big strong husband to help lug all the heavy bags.

If you are doing this on your own, you could most likely have the bags of growing mix components delivered and you could consider hiring a teen from your neighborhood to help lug the bags, set up the frame and add the mix. Once all that is in place, the going should be a breeze. But stay tuned!

One more tip. Check with your local library to see if they have some good gardening books. I found that our library, Johnson County Library has Mel Bartholomew's latest book on Square Foot Gardening. JOCO Library has a great website and I am able to reserve books online. I am number 3 on the wait list. I will try to be patient. I may end up at Borders. After all my gardening costs...I need to save the $24.95! Patience!