Building a home garden
Our first Garden in suburbia - Have space? why not have a home garden? We love fresh veggies and saving money. It should be relatively easy, right?
Deciding on the back right corner of the yard, we removed an old *giant* pile of brush some of which we broke down and used for the bottom layers of filler for the raised beds.
After collecting multiple pallets and rummaging through the collection of reclaimed wood we put together two raised beds and a compost “bin” (we had to put a lid on it to keep our dogs from digging through it). We lined the walls with chicken wire and covered that with weed-block paper. We filled the bottom half of the beds with the brush and straw so that we didn't spend so much unnecessary money on soil and also to allow for proper drainage of water through the garden beds. Slowly, over time, we worked to fill the raised beds with soil layers.
Pallets are great because they can be found often for free. They’re super strong, but they’re a pain to break down. We recommend you find a sawzall before you start on this project. We recommend you know how to use a sawzall before you go crazy on your pallets. As David can attest, fingers and sawblades don’t go well together. Remember, fingers are a finite resource! We also recommend you put your beds together with deck screws. Pallets are built from untreated lumber, so they will eventually rot away, and it’s nice to be able to take them apart later.
One thing to keep in mind when collecting and building with pallets is that they come in a plethora of sizes and styles. It can be quite challenging to keep your garden anything close to square if you try to build it with pallets of different sizes. You may also keep in mind that additional wood may be needed to fasten your pallets together.
From David’s past personal experience and some light research, we decided on a mixture of topsoil, peat moss, and mushroom compost. Here are some links and thoughts on each:
I have no idea how many bags of this topsoil eventually were spilled in the raised beds but it was A LOT - maybe 60 bags. In hindsight, a truck bed full of topsoil would have cost a lot less but these bags were much less physically difficult to move.
We got one truckload of mushroom compost from a local landscaping company for $18.00. This was SO HEAVY to shovel from the truck bed and into a wheelbarrow over to the raised beds.
And two of these peat moss bales, one in each raised bed. A bale of this peat moss doesn’t seem like a lot but it breaks apart and covers a lot of ground.