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May 16, 2007

Art & science project: A raised bed

Photo by Sheila Lennon - Click it to enlarge it.

Raised bed with broccoli, spinach, lettuce, garlic and giant allium, an ornamental. Its giant purple flower globes are startlingly beautiful.
Later: There are also green onions around the perimenter.

Our city lot is mostly shady, with big old trees -- cool and pleasant, but frustrating for a gardener. Everything has to compete with roots. Enormous effort yields lots of aggressive weeds but few veggies. I longed for a garden bed we could raise above these problems.

So, a few years ago, we heard of a factory being torn down on Eddy Street, and bought some of its oak floor beams. My husband treated them with natural wood preserver, and built what looked like a coffin for a giant. We lined it with black plastic, slashed at ground level for drainage, and filled it with everything organic we could find or beg: Soil and leaves that had piled up and slowly composted in a corner of the yard, pine needles and lime, vegetable scraps. The top layer was a mix of earthworm castings, compost and organic soil.

Each year, in early April when any perennials and bulbs that are coming back have shown their heads, we add a few bags of organic compost around them, to bring the soil level back up so the sun can get in there.

The soil teems with earthworms, and never compacts. The early compost layer keeps most weeds down, and new ones are easily pulled out with two fingers. Because the bed is so rich, we can plant thickly here, getting a lot of plants into a small space. It's on the west side of the house and gets full sun in late morning and midday, and bright filtered light under a high canopy till sunset.

April 26 we planted lettuce and spinach seed, and set in some broccoli plants around the daffodils and hyacinths. You can see its progress in the photo above.

In the fall, my colleague Sara Cooke offered garlic from her husband's bumper crop. We separated the bulbs into cloves and slipped them into the bed's loose soil. They sprang up immediately, and stayed up through the winter, getting brown at the tips during the late January freeze, but hanging in.

When the cool-weather crops fade, the left side of the bed will be sunny enough for tomatoes and peppers. One year we grew zucchini whose vines spill over and threatened to run down the street, but this year I'm planting a compact pattypan squash that the seed folks say can be grown in containers.

I'll occasionally post photos here of the progress of this bed, bugs and all.

Tomorrow: Seedlings on the deck in a $35 wheeled greenhouse. (Think shelves covered with a transparent garment bag.)

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 3:53 PM | Permalink

Comments

What did you treat the wood with?

joyce | May 16, 2007 6:52 PM link

Hi, Joyce,
I wrote that entry at work, and didn't remember at the time. I've looked it up, though. It's a recipe from the U.S. Forestry Service. Here's a link, and the ingredients:

Non-Toxic Wood Preservative Recipe The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Products Laboratory has developed this recipe for preserving lumber used aboveground (such as for fences and picnic tables). The treatment is also safe for wood to be used in the ground?that is, it won't leach toxic chemicals into your garden soil?and the wood will last longer than if left untreated.
Here's the recipe (and please be sure to follow it carefully):

# Melt 1 ounce of paraffin wax in a double boiler (DO NOT heat over a direct flame).

# Off to the side, carefully place slightly less than a gallon of solvent (mineral spirits, paint thinner or turpentine at room temperature) in a bucket, then slowly pour in the melted parrafin, stirring vigorously.

# Add 3 cups exterior varnish or 1.5 cups boiled linseed oil to the mix, stirring until the ingredients are blended. When it cools, you can dip your lumber into this mixture or brush it onto the wood.

Among these choices, we used turpentine and boiled linseed oil.

And, as I mentioned, we lined it with heavy plastic so the soil wouldn't come in contact with it.

Sheila Lennon | May 16, 2007 7:17 PM link

May 16, 2007

Art & science project: A raised bed

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