![]() ![]() I signed up and on a Saturday in March, 6 students came and helped me build a raised vegetable garden bed made of cinder blocks. Every year, local people can sign up to have students come to help with projects around your home. Texas A&M University has a GREAT school-wide community service project called " The Big Event". My new "house" had a blank slate for a yard :-(īut there's an old saying "bloom where you're planted" and after living here for almost a year - it was time to start "blooming". I finally have some more recent pictures to post about my cinder block garden. I will take another photo soon and give an update on how it looks. I bought them at Christmas Tree Shops and I have some peas planted at the base that are slowly coming up. You saved me from having to try them all myself. And thanks for sharing all your experiments with the holes. I did use rebar thanks to all the suggestions and it makes a big difference. I hadn't thought of that.ĭixieLib.thanks too for the rebar suggestion. I loved the idea of using a board as a screed to level the area. Old herb, thanks also for sharing all your construction tips. Thanks for sharing how you got them so stable and for sharing your photos. I didn't get a chance yet to take close ups of the holes that are planted but I am still planning on it. I filled some blocks with pea gravel, so I can step on them and get into the bed without worrying about stepping on something. I have hens and chicks along both sides in selected holes and two sedum vera jamesons in two holes at both ends with thymes in each corner block. I also liked the idea of sedums/semperviens/thyme and those are the exact same things I planted in my holes. I love the way your beds fit the space and your alpine strawberries look so healthy! I tried strawberries.not alpine.and they didn't seem to like the heat and I was always watering them and they were in my way trying to get into the bed. You used two blocks wide and I used three and yours are a lot longer than mine. :-(īostonian.I LOVE your two garden beds too! Ours are very similar in size. I just noticed that there were a few other posts that I didn't take the time to respond to last time as I was hurrying.sorry. I filled the bed, cut off the extra fabric and filled the pockets with soil and planted them with a variety of thymes I use in the kitchen. I made sure the floor of the hole was level using a screed stick (a straight board or brood handle work for this.) Next I layed brick around the bottom edge of the bed followed by the cinder blocks on top.įinally I lined the sides with landscape fabric to keep the water and soil from seeping out the cracks. ![]() The hole I dug for the bed became known as "the grave".about 8' x 4'.the neighbor kids thought it was pretty cool. The moles can't come up into the bed with this barrier (Learned this lesson with my first large raised bed garden some years ago after we neglected this step). Hardware cloth is a wire mesh sold by the foot at hardware stores or in roles at Home Depot and Lowes). THE FIX: After I had dug the bed debth I wanted I installed 1/4" hardware cloth as a barrier. I have a couple of things that will help with some of the issues surrounding the cement aka cinder blocks for raised beds that I needed to apply to my first bed and they seem to be working out very well.įirst thing is.we have moles and moles find structures like contained raised beds a delight to frolic in, usually doing in favorite plants or running right along the edges where its impossible to catch them.dirty little buggers. I got well-drained beds, a dry pathway, and a place to store blocks and bricks. My beds vary from 8 inches high to a few inches deep when a crop will be growing in hot, dry winds.Ī few times I filled the pathways with bricks or concrete blocks. I have driven a white pipe into the ground on the center line of each 4-foot bed and I let the width of the beds be less than 4 feet when I need a wide path for some crop or to run a cart thru the path. Now I am walking on the concrete blocks, using them as a path. The cover crops keep down the weeds and mean I do not have to work the soil until May or July because the weeds are smothered out.Īcually I did have one wall of concrete blocks 8 x 8 x 16, but profuse gifts of tree wastes and dirt filled the path and the low, wet adjacent bed. ![]() Often I sort of level the beds into the paths when I am planting cover crops such as clover, buckwheat, or small grains so that I have more organic matter growing. One problem with using walls on plant beds is injuring my hands on the walls unless I slow down. Often I throw pulled weeds, tree wastes, lawn wastes into the paths to avoid walking in the mud. I have about 100 beds and use 16 inch paths between the beds. I use beds 4 x 25 feet which gives me 100 sq ft per bed. I find it cheaper to use no walls for my beds. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |