Raised beds

I'm moving into a house that has a relatively small back garden. The small lawn is immaculate. I will probably only stay at this house for less than 3 years before reselling, so I don't want to turn the entire back garden into a veggie garden because this will make the property harder to resell. I have fantasies about intensive veg growing in raised beds as I've grown a lot in very large containers. I'd want to drop the beds onto the back of the lawn and have approx 7 x 1.5m of space there to use, some of which is almost in full sun, some of which will be shaded in the morning.

I've seen some raised beds on sale in a local garden centre £50 for 1.8m x 1m x 38cm (nice and deep!) This seems like a bargain. The alternative is to buy timber and make them myself. Budget is fairly important but I'm growing mostly for pleasure rather than as a cost-saving measure.

What should I look out for in terms of wood preservative, so that there's no danger of poisoning me or my plants?

What about liners? Could I just line the sides? After all, I want excess water to drain away. (I bought a huge lined jute bag planter for my mum. It doesn't drain properly and clearly the compost at the bottom is fetid.) I tend to be an overenthusiastic waterer.

Help! I've got lots of other purchasing decisions to make and want to buy garden stuff in the sales this summer.

 

£50 sea expensive to me. I made mine from wooden fencing kick board which cost me £3 for a 10 ft length. Also try pricing scaffold boards. I don't think that there would be any harm to line the side with plastic.

Rusty

 

Have you thought about plastic ones then you have no need to treat

I have linkaboard ones they are really light and easy to put together and you can make them any depth u want

http://www.linkabord.co.uk

 

Thanks for those ideas. The scaffolding boards sound a very good idea. I'll ask a neighbour who's a retired builder.

 

You sure that making a veg patch will decrease the value of the property? New owners could put a lawn back, and your raised beds are going to kill the grass under them! (and if it were me I would want to rough-dig under the raised beds to improve drainage and root-run)

What are you going to fill the raised beds with? 1.8m x 1m x 38cm is 684 litres - that's over half a tonne so quite a lot to "heft", and is going to cost about £50 for bags of multi-purpose compost (which I don't think is the best thing to use for raised beds). Similar price for topsoil.

 

So you think I'd be as well to dig up some of the lawn and have a normal veggie plot?

 

Well I would!

We were in rented accommodation for "a year" ... we set about doing whatever we wanted to make the place home. Just as well really because, as things turned out, we were there for 7 years!

Raised beds and soil to fill them is quite expensive. Useful if you cannot bend etc. easily. Also useful on very heavy ground, for drainage, but in that instance [I have that here] just dig out the paths and pile the soil on the "raised" beds, no need to build them up more then that.

But raised beds also look good, and that can trump all other considerations of course!

 

My raised beds are made of railways sleepers.
It was a massive project, and I wouldn't have done it if I was planning on moving in the near future.

 

They make smart looking beds I have some here for a free-standing raised bed under the trees (to stop tree roots growing up into the beds).

My 2p-worth on raised vegetable beds is that they should be 4' wide (no wider, that is reacheable for either side), and if railway sleepers are used then the width of the sleepers means you lose 1/4 the width of a bed (4' bed plus 18" path, railway sleepers on each side will take up 8") - so in an area where you could squeeze in 4 beds, you will only get 3 :(

No quibble for raised beds that need to be significantly raised (for someone who can't bend, for example), but to raise them just a few inches I would use old [cracked] scaffolding boards. Not a pretty look though!

 

I picked up some old scaffolding boards for mine - Ive only got one layer on at the moment but I expect to add a second tier next year when Ive saved up some more topsoil:

--
By the middle of June it looked "lived in"

--

 

Do you need a second tier? Thin soil in the garden? or difficulty bending?

If it is just heavy soil + drainage I reckon I have achieved that with just a few inches (but I also dug out my paths to increase the "raise" / drainage).

 

I would certainly not use railway sleepers with creosote, and I would not use plastic recycled fake timbers because all sorts of toxins may be in them - and would not even use plastic sheeting. I would use pressuretreated wood that has no arsnic - just copper based chemicals. In USA they have a ferociously aggressive wood treating organization, the American Wood Protection Association (AWPA), formerly American Wood-Preservers' Association, which insures standardized chemicals and best compounds - I do not think UK has the same.

I would go with a double layer of Tanalised E treated fence timbers (4X4 inch approximately) but first would read more on it. At least with Tanalised E you can know what is in it, and know it will have a good lifespan.

 

A thing about scaffolding boards - they are a glued laminated board not intended for ground contact or food production. You will not know if some company has treated them with fungicide or what jobs they were on - they will rot and you do not know what the interior adhesive layers are composed of.

I would stick with tanalized because it is a known product and if ever some study found it was a problem (it being in huge use for raised beds) the news would soon spread. All the other choices like sleepers, pallets, plastic, scaffolding boards.......these are unknowns - and remember, you are using it for food products. The previous owners, producers, are under no obligation to have studies on safety for gardening - and for disclosing any adulterations or sources.

And never, ever, treat bed wood with any preservative - the pressure treating is stable as it has bonded to the wood molecules, a brush on preservative is not chemically bonded and will enter the soil.

 

Connamon, what to fill the bed with would be more of a concern in many ways. Plenty of 'Garden Soil' 40 lb bags sold here are very suspect, they are ground up wood, partially composted, and usually the provenance is murky, old pallets, treated lumber, who knows, can end up in them. The cheapest contain ash from coal burning. If virgin wood from saw mills only was used they are excellent. Pine bark is good - all pure. I do not trust recycled compost or chippings.

I go to the beach and dig sand in 500 to 800 pound batches and then use it 1 part to 2 - 3 parts compost. I especially would look up landscapers to find who sells actual top soil. Here it is $40 a thousand pounds in small amounts from a place that has bins of gravel, sand, soil, wood chippings and such, you pick up, (a cubic foot weighs about 110 pounds) and in UK it must be available in smaller amounts. (Here by the dump truck load top soil is $18 a ton with $60 for delivery with a 10 ton dump truck - 1 or 10 tons the delivery charge is the same)

But if you are going through the huge effort of setting up all this, then the effort of growing (I suspect organic) I would look extremely closely at the contents of any bag of 'soil' to see it is not recycled material or from used building products. I would look at using pine bark as part of the medium if that is available - never used it but a Phd agronomist I know uses it for his gardens. Not that I think organic is healthier really, but because it is more aesthetic.

 

Cinnamon, if your only there for three years I would hold the dream of productive raised beds until your in a place where you will stay for much longer. I would dig some veggie beds straight out of the lawn and not worry about the extra purchases of topsoil and/or edging.

If you want to when you come to sell it will be just a case of levelling the beds and re-turfing, so both the start and end of the veggie beds will be easy, cheap and productive and no lugging around tonnes of materials for a couple of years use.

As an aside, scaffold planks here in the UK are solid timber and not laminated, second hand scaffold planks have been used in garden applications for decades here in the UK. Because they are solid timber, they occasionally split with the grain and then they are of no use to the scaffold company and against health and safety regs, they are then sold of quite cheap.

Steve...