Monday 23 April 2018

Making beds

After preparing the ground over the weekend and surveying the last remaining work was to actually build the raised beds. This once again actually involved planning, to the extent that there was actually a design involved:

The aim is to end up with beds about 1.5 x 3 m in size (5 x 10 feet in old money, or American) with posts on each corner and half way down the long sides to either use as plant supports or to hang netting from. For one bed this is the raw materials:

6 planks / 6 tree posts. Decided to first make the west-most bed (note to self: need to decide on an indexing scheme) as we have cabbages to go in and this bit is quite heavy (which cabbages like.) First assembled the ends using (i) string from surveying and (ii) an extra plank to make sure the spacing was the same top and bottom:

These were simply fixed with 4 x 40 mm PZ2 screws. The amount of post at the sharp end is around 450 mm, which should be enough to make sure things stay stable, and also means having to hammer it in nearly half a meter... 🤔hammered one into place then got it level:

Then measured up position wise for the far end, put the middle posts in and then kept hammering until all the posts were level - last part was to fix the sides on:


then level the sides up:

then finally rake all the soil around to make sure it was level and up to the bottom of the wood, to stop critters getting in if we cover it:

Today I learned:

  • hammering wooden posts 450 mm into clay is hard work
  • raking the soil level before you start is a good idea
  • making two more of these beasties is likely to be a full morning or afternoon's work
but hopefully will do the job, and means we can avoid walking on there in future to stop soil from becoming compacted - once the others are in place will sow some grass seed to start making dedicated paths...

No comments:

Post a Comment