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

Raised beds from recycled materials

I was supposed to be writing a post this week about designing my raised beds, but I decided to go on holiday instead. However, because I’m so dedicated to the Rocket Gardens cause, I’m now writing this is, whilst sat in a bar, nursing a cold beer, at the bottom of the slopes. It’s a hard life!.
I realised late last week that not everyone has a saw mill with a friendly owner nearby. Not only that, it’s not always that easy to transport materials from a saw mill unless you have a trailer or van. This started me thinking about other cheap or free materials that are available for creating beds or containers. I’m sure you’ll be able to come up with more interesting ideas than I have but here a few to get you going.
Firstly, used car tyres are brilliant. They can be fitted in the back of a car and can be picked up for nothing from a local tyre fitter. They're great for growing carrots, courgettes or even spuds, if you stack them on top of one another. Raised beds made out of tyres look a bit like the tyre walls in the Grand Prix. They also hold compost rather well, too.
Old soft drink cans are pretty handy if you can collect enough of them. We’ve built raised beds from them in the past by sticking them together using silicone (which can be bought from a DIY store) and then making them into a circular raised bed.

If you have any builders nearby, see if you can get hold of the big nylon bags that sand comes in. They hold compost really quite well and if you don’t grab them they’ll probably get put in the bin.
Reclamation yards are also a brilliant source of building goodies. They will have a whole host of fantastic things to grow in- old floor boards, bricks and a million other things, if you keep your mind open.
If you have any ideas that you’d like to share, please comment and tell everyone about it.

I'm back off to the slopes!

Cheers and gone,

Rob

Raised Beds (part 1)

My sister wrote some lovely things about me last week but I thought it was best to introduce myself briefly in my own words. I like taking things apart and trying to put them back together again without too many bits left over. I like bumbling through the woods with my dog and mucking about in my boat on the Helford River. I think that it should only rain at night and snow is brilliant for short periods. I love what I do at Rocket Gardens and now that I’m settled at the farm, it’s time to start a veg patch.

I have an area just outside the office that’s 14 metres by 18 metres that I’d like to fill with 6 raised beds. I’m going to try and do everything quickly and on the cheap to prove that gardening doesn’t have to be expensive or all-consuming. I want to create a garden for all the rocket staff to use and enjoy that looks nice and is easy to maintain.

Over the weekend I went down to see a friendly chap at a local sawmill and picked up a load of waste timber to build my beds from. This is a much cheaper option than using railway sleepers or wood bought from the builders merchants, not only that it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside to be using something that no-one else wants.

During the coming week I’ll draw up a garden plan, mark out the beds and I’ll post about it next week so you can see how I got on.

Cheers and gone,

Rob