First, I laid a layer of cardboard down. That was pretty simple, I just cut it down to fit to the size of the box with a box cutter.
Next, because we had leaves in the yard I raked some up from the yard put some of those in on top of the cardboard. Usually I like to do this when everything outside is wet. It saves me the trouble of setting it down so it begins to decompose, but this bed was being used for strawberries that needed to be planted as soon as possible.
Because these strawberries were a surprise , I didn’t have time to get any free dirt, so I asked Ian to grab a few bags of soil from the hardware store. This definitely isn’t how I plan to fill the rest of my beds because that would increase our costs a lot, but it worked in a pinch.
This setup is so simple and easy to do, our narrow boxes are about 3.5’ x 1.5’ when they’re all finished. The bigger boxes we left square at 3.5’ x 3.5’ so they are better for growing more crops. We didn’t need the strawberry beds to be huge so we kept these boxes small.
Normally I don’t buy dirt for my beds, I use compost directly on top of the boxes, then cover it with topsoil from elsewhere on my landlord’s property. he had some extra just laying around, so we’re lucky enough to get our beds filled for free this year! I’ll do another blog post dedicated to showing that process later on, but for now, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. 🙂
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Last year, our garden was a side project that took a back seat to caring for myself while I grew Abbie, and took care of her after she was born in the beginning of August. We wanted to make a homemade pantry, and made lots of progress towards that, but this year we’re doing everything we can to make our homemade pantry fully stocked, so we’re only buying 30% of our food from the store throughout the year.
A huge part of making the garden easier to manage is to make ourselves some raised beds that keep the grass from creeping into the garden. Our goal is to make and fill them as cheaply as possible, while still making them work for our goals for the year: to grow enough food for a fully stocked pantry, and possibly enough to sell at the farmer’s market as well.
First, I laid a layer of cardboard down. That was pretty simple, I just cut it down to fit to the size of the box with a box cutter.
Next, because we had leaves in the yard I raked some up from the yard put some of those in on top of the cardboard. Usually I like to do this when everything outside is wet. It saves me the trouble of setting it down so it begins to decompose, but this bed was being used for strawberries that needed to be planted as soon as possible.
Because these strawberries were a surprise , I didn’t have time to get any free dirt, so I asked Ian to grab a few bags of soil from the hardware store. This definitely isn’t how I plan to fill the rest of my beds because that would increase our costs a lot, but it worked in a pinch.
This setup is so simple and easy to do, our narrow boxes are about 3.5’ x 1.5’ when they’re all finished. The bigger boxes we left square at 3.5’ x 3.5’ so they are better for growing more crops. We didn’t need the strawberry beds to be huge so we kept these boxes small.
Normally I don’t buy dirt for my beds, I use compost directly on top of the boxes, then cover it with topsoil from elsewhere on my landlord’s property. he had some extra just laying around, so we’re lucky enough to get our beds filled for free this year! I’ll do another blog post dedicated to showing that process later on, but for now, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. 🙂