Sunday, January 26, 2014

More on My Raised Beds

Today was a beautiful day in the high 50s, a little breezy, but lovely weather to be outside. And outside I was, all day. I mixed up all the ingredients to fill my raised beds.

I am following the Square Foot Gardening method this year. I have four 4x4 beds. I am filling them with equal parts vermiculite, peat moss and compost.

I just used my wheel barrel, a garden cart and 5 gallon buckets. I put a bucket full of each ingredient in the wheel barrel and used a hoe to mix it up. My wheel barrel can hold 8 cu ft, but I put about 6 in it so I could have room to mix it up.

Then on to the beds to dump it in. Then repeat about a million times.

Then I covered the beds with plastic to try to keep rain from washing out nutrients. I just stapled it all around the beds. Don't know if that is a good idea or not or if it will even work, but I did it anyway.

I bought some broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower seeds and a little green house thing to start them out. Wish me luck!

my raised beds

bill and i bought the materials to make 4 raised beds. and we made them. they measure 4'x4'x1'. we used untreated pine. we also stapled wire mesh to the bottoms so nothing would dig up and get stuff. i don't really know if it's necessary or not, but it's done now.

today we are supposed to be mixing up the ingredients to fill the boxes. we have compost, vermiculite and peat moss. it's supposed to be a nice day today. we'll see how it goes. i will give an update and post a picture or 2 later if we get it done.

and as a side note: i had collected leaves from our yard and the neighbor's yard this past fall. i shredded them with the leaf shredder i bought. i ended up with 6 large leaf bags full of shredded leaves to use this spring and summer for making compost. i stored them under my deck in the back yard. i'm not sure if it was the dogs or the kids, but every bag was ripped open and the leaves spread all around under the deck. i just want to cry about that.