How deep should it be?

I think this belongs here (sincere apologies if not), but ....

Our neighbour has a row of 4 Leylandii (if I'm allowed to mention the 'L' word), about 15' tall. Now, to be fair, he didn't plant them and he does keep them cut back as much as he's able but, of course, nothing will grow beneath them. My husband's idea is to build some 'containers' about 1.8 metres long (convenient to get in the car!), 60 cm wide and 60 cm high, in front of which he proposes to make a smaller container, same length but about half the height and width - a two-tier system in fact. In the smaller of the two I aim to put bedding plants or similar but in the larger (rear) one, I'm hoping to grow veggies.

All this is a rather long winded way of asking, is 180 x 60 x 60 cm going to be big enough to grow such things as runner and broad beans next year - only he's so keen bless him, he's out there marking out his bits of wood, counting his screws and doing whatever else he needs to do and I'd hate him to finish only to find they're too small!

 

It is a common misconception that nothing will grow at the foot of Leylandii. Just to be clear, I don't like Leylandii, but in the interests of fairness, I won't blame it for stuff it didn't do

I have a Leylandii hedge (like your neighbour, I didn't plant it, it was there and overgrown when I moved in). I did struggle to get anything to grow well at the foot of it for a while, but that was more down to the fact that the soil was completely depleted, and being the sunniest part of the garden, on a slope, and with poor soil structure meant that it was tinder dry most of the time. I've since put several sacks of farmyard manure in there to improve the soil structure and improve its moisture retaining ability, and now it is doing really well.

 

I think a container 60cm wide and 60cm deep, which is about 2 feet in old money, would be fine for things like Runners and Broad beans.

 

I like old money! You knew where you were - my recently installed new kitchen had things which were 1500 x 600 x 1872 - which is how big? :cnfs: The 'man' said 'mm are more accurate...' which is no doubt why, in my imperial built house, it means the floor units finish up 4" (112mm) shorter than the length of the wall - the resultant gap no longer being referred to as 'wasted space' but a .... 'tray space'!

 

"don't understand how the man can say that mm are more accurate"

There are lots of MM to the inch :thumb: In fact, 6 inches is 152 MM - impressive or what? :hehe:

 

and every mm counts!!!!!!!!!

 

Maybe we should ditch mm in favour of microns ( µm ) instead. There's loads of them kicking about, 1 million in ever meter or 25,400 to an inch. We'll never run out of those.

 

My husband is old enough to remember working in 'ems', 'ens' and 'picas' - to the extent that, when measuring something, he can often be heard to mutter '.. that's about 6 and a pica ..' :skp: IMVHO metrication merely makes it easier for the mathematically challenged to 'do sums' - ah, how I miss the joy of 'Calculate the number of feet in x miles, x furlongs and x chains and express your answer in yards'.

As for the beans - we were talking about beans? Oh, yes - the beans. They'll be facing east - about 150m km from the sun (give or take a km or two) but who cares? I may just grow ..... old instead.

 

"Calculate the number of feet in x miles, x furlongs and x chains and express your answer in yards"

Google will do that for you :

10 miles + 12 furlongs + 3 chains in yards =

gives 20,306 yards