Building the raised vegetable beds

Garden transformation Part 3 – 2013-2014

In September 2013 a month after moving in, I started my garden plan. We’d already decided to build a 160ft long south facing wall (the Great Wall), which was going to set the tone for a walled kitchen garden. The centre piece was to be six brick built raised vegetable beds.

I’ve never really understood why people put their veg patch as far away from the house as possible. I suppose the idea goes back to the days when you had staff to grow your vegetables and retrieve them for you. But back here in the 21st century! When you get home at night, do you really want to traipse off to the end of the garden for ingredients? I certainly don’t!

With this in mind, our ‘veg plot’ was going to be situated just off the patio area. As it would be seen from the house, we wanted it to be as attractive as possible. Therefore I designed a very formal, symmetrical lay-out of six brick raised beds. My thinking was that if we get too old for veg growing (although my sister’s father in law is now 95 and still producing food). We could always grow flowers in them.

This area of the garden also has sunshine nearly all day.

In mid-September we laid out the first two raised beds with planks, to see what they would look like. We also wanted to make sure the pathways in between, would be wide enough for a wheelbarrow.

Once we were happy we set about building them, firstly digging a trench for concrete foundations. I then laid four rows of bricks, with help from my trusty labourer! A couple of weekends later, they were finished.

The next job was to fill them up with our lovely pre-sieved soil and some manure from a farmer friend.

I’ve mentioned our very stony soil previously and I will be talking more about it in the coming weeks. It is actually lovely soil, once it’s been riddled.

Over the next few months we had so many things to do in the garden. I started to build the ‘shady wall’ and built a raised bamboo bed. Whilst my husband was chopping mammoth amounts of foliage down, in between labouring for me.

This resulted in the next four raised beds not being built until the following April.

Let’s get planting!

On completion we immediately set about turning one of them into an asparagus bed. I’m sure most of you know that you can’t harvest asparagus for the first two years, so it was vital to get this planted as soon as possible. This is where I struggle as a gardener, as you need patience which are not one of my natural virtues!

The idea was to use the two middle beds for permanent crops. The one already planted with asparagus and the other we planted with rhubarb. Then the four beds at each corner, were to be on an annual rotation. This is to stop pests and diseases, specific to any one vegetable group from building up.

Different veg groups like different amounts of nutrients in the soil. Therefore only one bed gets manured each year. The first plants into the manured bed are squashes as they are the greediest group of plants. They are followed by the legumes (peas & beans). The brassicas (cabbage family) come next. Finally the roots, as if they have too many nutrients they split, creating the amusing carrots.

The first two mistakes

Parts of the garden had ground elder. We had no idea how dreadful this weed was. Every little tiny bit of root can regrow into another plant. We unfortunately introduced it into the first raised bed.

As we certainly weren’t going to use chemicals, anywhere that we were producing food, we covered the bed in thick black plastic as we’d heard Bob Flowerdew recommend so many times, on Gardeners Question Time.

This bed then served as a home for the many plants we’d brought with us.

The next mistake was planting strawberries in with the asparagus. I’d read about the benefits of companion planting. You need all the help you can get when gardening organically. The strawberries spread all across the asparagus, there just wasn’t enough space. I’m sure they would be fine together in open ground, but they certainly didn’t work in the confines of a raised bed.

Asparagus being swamped by the strawberries

The first harvest

Despite those couple of problems and considering how hard we were working with all the other landscaping. We managed to produce a substantial amount of food in that first growing season. Tomatoes, salad, chilli’s, runner beans, broad beans, French beans, mange tout, leeks, purple sprouting broccoli, strawberries and rhubarb.