Raised beds (part 2)

It took a little longer than I intended to write this post as there are so many exciting things happening on the farm at the moment. The polytunnels are filling up with plants fast, the bluebells are popping up their green bits in the woods and the fruit bushes in the field are all turning from lifeless looking twigs to bushy green things.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the garden over the last month, this is a lot to do with the pile of wood staring at me through the office window. My normal way of tackling a project is to get stuck in and work my way through problems as they arise. I’ve had mixed success with this way of working, but since I’m having to explain what I’m doing and there’s the potential for loads of people to see me muck this up, planning seems to have taken a front seat.

To kick this planning process off I decided to measure out the space I had available. After a frustrating half hour of searching for a tape measure, I gave up and moved onto plan b. I’m not entirely sure on the accuracy of this method but it suited my needs just fine – logging onto Google Earth I found that my patch measures 19m/13m.

Armed with my dubious measurements, an excellent selection of stationary I’d liberated from the office, I set to making a scale plan of the garden. To make life easy I choose a 1cm to 1m scale, with this I drew out the tiny 19cm by 13cm garden onto A3 paper.

At this point I had to decide how I was going to rotate my vegetable patch. There are a few schools of thought here. Because I have plenty of space and wood I thought I’d try two of them- the 3 and 4 bed rotations. As the title suggests, I need 4 beds for one of them and 3 for the other. I also want a bed for rhubarb, one for asparagus, one for flowers to attract bees, one for strawberries and a spare one just in case I run out of room. That's a total of 12 beds.

During the build I wanted to waste as little material as possible. With this in mind, I decided on making a good proportion of the beds 5m long as this was the length the wood arrived in. I found some old card and cut out a few 5/1.2m beds to my crafty new scale and laid them out onto the garden plan to see how they would fit in. Once these were on the paper I soon realised that I couldn’t make all 12 beds 5m long. After a bit of sliding beds around I decided that 6 would fit in quite nicely. This meant the four beds for one of the rotations were sorted, plus my strawberry bed and spare one. Based on the space I had left, I cut out some 3/1.2cm beds and slid these around until I found that five fitted in. This covered the 3 bed rotation, rhubarb bed and asparagus. With a good space free in the centre of the garden and an excellent supply of willow in the woods at the bottom of the farm, I decided on a 3m round bed for all the pretty flowers.

Once I was happy with how everything was laid out I found a tape measure and ventured outside to double check the garden measurements. Reasonably happy with how everything worked out, I checked that the Rocket crew were happy with it and then firmed up the design with a biro. Planning completeish, I’d better head into the workshop and start building.

Cheers and gone,

Rob