Building a garden

Whenever the weather has given us a few unfrozen, dry days over the past month (rare), Mike and I have been preparing the garden. We started with a blank slate, the clearing left over from when someone tried to garden years and years ago. We’re thankful that they cleared out the trees for us, but I doubt they accomplished much beyond that. The ground is really dense, clay-like soil that doesn’t drain well. But we’re not daunted. The answer is creating raised beds, which is why we’re having to do so much work.

We start by marking out a 12×4-foot area that will become the raised bed. To loosen up the soil and do away with the grass and weeds growing there, we start by digging a 1-foot-deep trench the length of the bed, putting the soil off the side in chunks as intact as we can manage (so the topsoil structure doesn’t break up, which = damage). Then Mike takes a digging fork, like a pitchfork, and stabs it into the dirt at the bottom of the trench as many times as he can before he falls over from exhaustion. This breaks up the next 8 inches or so to help with drainage.

I come along behind him, laying down dry leaves in the trench, which will slowly break down and leave organic material in the soil (which is very good) as well as help water flow through, and topping it with a couple inches of “topsoil plus.” That’s a 50-50 blend of good topsoil and compost that we bought from a local garden supply center. We have a rather huge pile of it, as seen below.

Then it’s time to move to the next row, so we dig another 1-foot trench the length of the bed right next to the first row. Only this time the dirt we dig up gets placed in the previous row on top of the leaves and compost. The process repeats until the dirt from the original trench is placed on top of the final trench. Then we nail the boards in place around the bed, smooth the soil out over the whole bed, add another layer of topsoil plus, and add some fertilizer*. Even though we only add about a couple inches of new material, by digging and moving dirt that was already there we add some air to the mix (which is good because roots need oxygen), so we end up with a bed that’s about 4 or 5 inches taller than the ground where it started.

It’s preposterously tiring work. Each bed takes about 6 hours of hard labor. But in return for working very hard this year to set up the raised beds, we will get to do fairly minimal work every year hereafter. And we’ll be rewarded with better and better soil every year as the organic matter (compost, leaves, old plants from the year before, etc) builds up.

We finished our third bed this weekend, and we’re hoping to do at least seven more this year. Eventually we’d like to have 20 or more, which would give us room for a stupendous amount of homegrown produce.

*Mike would like me to note that for fertilizer we’re using an organic blend of ecofriendly nutrients. Using good fertilizer like this that won’t contaminate groundwater or poison the wildlife around us makes us both feel good, and making sure that you all know we’re using it makes him feel good.