The Raised Beds

In February 2016, I finished constructing four raised beds. All of them are four feet wide. The first one I built, the farthest to the left as seen from the back patio, is 24 feet long. The other three are only 22 feet long, since I started worrying about building inside the easement after I finished the first one.


The first bed encroached on the space around the water oak that was lined with bricks, as well as the bench swing frame, which I had taken to calling the arbor. Before I started building it, I removed all the bricks around the tree, the arbor, and the bricks that constituted the arbor's floor, and three of the concrete blobs at the bases of the arbor's posts. One of the posts broke while I was trying to remove its blob from its hole, and I left the blob there since it would be much harder to move without having the post as a lever. The three concrete blobs are at the front end of of the other three beds.

From the start, I intended to use the four raised beds for an 8-plot garden rotation, with two plots in each bed. At first none of the beds were very productive because the brand new soil contained a lot of wood chips and no added compost. As the wood chips broke down, they took in much of the nitrogen in the surrounding soil, leaving little for the plants I was trying to grow.