We spent the past couple of weekends building the raised garden boxes that will be the foundation of our backyard gardens. We’re basing our approach on the technique outlined by Mel Bartholomew in his book, “Square Foot Gardening“. The basic concept is to build a raised garden bed, filled with a growing medium blended from equal parts (by volume) of compost, vermiculite, and peat moss. There are some subtleties in the types of compost used (ie. you’re supposed to mix at least 5 different sources of compost to increase the probability of a wide-spectrum of nutrients), but other than that it’s relatively straight forward.
The first step is to build the frames, which we’ve done:
The book is full of variations the reader can choose to adopt, or not, depending on particular situations. For our part, the yard is slightly sloped where we placed the frames, so we opted to dig down slightly in order to terrace them. We also lined the bottom of the boxes with a wire screen to keep out tunneling critters, then laid down a weed barrier:
Oddly enough, we found it relatively difficult to find large bags of vermiculite. After calling around to the various shops in the area, we opted to order a couple large bags from Uline, a packaging wholesaler, rather than purchase a dozen smaller bags. Doing so was easier, and was about half the cost.
Next up, when we receive the vermiculite, we should have all the raw ingredients for the soil. We hope to mix it up and load the frames next weekend. In the meantime, we’re planning out what we’ll grow and start germinating some of the seeds inside. We’re definitely a bit behind schedule on the germination, but we’re learning as we go… hopefully next season we’ll be much further along by this point.
More as it develops!
Tags: compost, frames, peat moss, soil composition, vermiculite
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