A Place to Call Home: Dig a Hole, Fill it Up

As you know, Nick and I have decided to try our hand(s?) at raised bed gardening. The first bed was an experimental one over last fall and winter. We bought a kit to create the bed, filled it with about a food of soil, and managed to grow radishes, lettuce, a few carrots, and even a little bit of broccoli. Not bad for an experiment, but this year we wanted to do it right. This meant actually digging the remaining beds. We planned to expand from one to three this year. Eventually we would like to have more, but we thought three was a manageable number for us beginners. Over the course of about a week and a half, Nick put in bed #2, and we are nearly finished with bed #3 (finished digging it this afternoon). Here's an overview:

Nick found some relatively cheap cedar to build the remaining two bed frames. Cedar is best because it is the most naturally rot-resistant; you don't need to treat it with any chemicals that you would then have to worry about leaching into the soil.

Next, he marked off the 4' x 8' bed

After that came the heavy labor of digging. He dug our second bed all by himself one day a week or so ago while I was away at work. This involved digging up basically 32 cubic feet of dirt, since he dug about a foot down. Except that our "soil" is in fact red clay that grows rocks the way New England soil does. So each wheelbarrow load had to be manually sorted to remove large rocks as well as any vegetation already present. Suffice to say I came home that day to find my husband collapsed on the couch.

After this came the fun part! We have been collecting piles and piles of small trees and branches as we have cleared them for several months, and they've been sitting in heaps drying in the backyard.

It was time to put them to use to create "biochar". This process involves burning said plant matter in the trench to create a mineral-rich ash to feed the soil.

Nick carefully tended to it to coax the small fire to migrate from one end of the bed to the other. Once we were happy with it, we parked ourselves on the newly painted backyard swing and had a well-deserved drink.

Biochar! Smells great and it's nutritious!

Once the biochar had cooled (ie. the next day), Nick placed the frame, and in the empty site mixed in manure, a little bit of peat, some high-quality garden soil, a little bit of topsoil, and the original soil that had been dug out of the bed. Et voila!

Isn't it gorgeous? You'll notice that the walls on the bed he built (foreground) are only six inches tall, as compared to the twelve inches on the store-bought (background) bed. That's because we did not dig the store-bought bed, so the twelve inches contained there is all there is. It's a foot deep, whereas the new bed is about eighteen inches deep, most of it below-ground.

Both of these beds were seeded about a week ago with a variety of fruits and veggies, and we have transplanted some of our seedlings. The transplants don't look so hot because we did not "harden them", or allow them to gradually acclimate to being outside. We should have, and they may not make it, but if that happens the local farm store has transplants.