Raising a Garden

I have grown a vegetable garden at or near my house for the last 15 years or so. It is a lot of fun, and I enjoy the ever challenging process that vegetable gardening brings.

This year I decided to move the garden to a better location in our yard. The old garden was located along the back of our property. I thought it was a good location at the time, but really crummy soil and lack of sunshine made this a less than ideal place to plant a garden. Even with compost and added topsoil, the old garden spot would never gain any more sun.

I scouted out a new location for the garden, and decided to put it next to the house. It is a nice sunny location with plenty of early afternoon to evening light. The only problem: the power line is buried directly below the area I wanted to till for the new garden space.

In my head, I knew if that I wanted to move the garden to this spot, a raised bed garden would be needed to avoid tilling up the power line. 

I was all set to build a large raised bed garden until my wife Tracy bought me the book "The Vegetable Gardener's Bible" by Edward C. Smith.  Smith uses raised bed gardens exclusively, and explains his philosophy on wide raised bed gardening. I was hooked, and built my garden in three wide beds with plenty of room to walk and mow around.

 

 

Stakes and rope were used to create the shapes of the new garden space

The garden spaces were cut out with a spade, and lightly turned with a shovel before building the boxes.

 I first roughed in the space with string and stakes, and then cut in the sod to make the three raised bed areas before building the boxes on top. I used 2x12x12 foot untreated lumber for the construction of the boxes. The book was great in giving me exact dimensions to build with, and Smith uses a 4x12 foot garden in his book as an example. It was nice having a plan to work from.

The first of three boxes are built.

All three boxes in place.

The last box was created with a triangle shaped top, to accommodate the space I had left. Basically I could not go any further, and wanted to maximize my garden space. After building the boxes, it was time to bring in the dirt! Our topsoil is pretty bad, so I called a local nursery and they delivered eight cubic yards of topsoil in a dump truck to the house.

It took 72 wheelbarrow loades from the front of the house to the back of the house to turn this:

 

Into this....

 

...with enough black topsoil left over for our other summer gardening projects.

With the boxes filled to the brim with topsoil an a mixture of compost and leaves, it is time to let them settle for a few days before planting the new garden plants. 

All three raised beds filled to the rim with topsoil and compost. 

I am a stubborn over achiever. I never like to let anything get in the way of my ideas, and making this raised bed garden was just another way to reach that brick wall and punch right through it. I really enjoy the Zen time that gardening brings, and also enjoy the fresh harvest from a home grown vegetable garden.