beds 7,8 and 9 are in - 3 more to go

progress continues on my raised beds. the picture on the left shows beds 7,8,9 ready for action. as mentioned before, i have space for 12 beds so 3 more to go and the bed project is ready for prime time.

my current daily run rate, (when i can actually get an entire day dedicated to the project) cranks out a terrace, builds the trex walls, attaches the chicken wire bottom, placing and leveling the bed and starts filling the bed with topsoil.


thank goodness for daylight savings time, as i now have about 3 hours of work time (m-f after work) before it gets dark. i am actually making decent progress on a daily basis - weekends arent the only time i can get work done. best estimates will have the rest of the beds done by the end of march.

the picture on the right gives an idea of the terracing needed to level out an average bed. its tough to see, but next to the fence is my grandpa's pitchfork. leveling that end to the same height as the front end (identified by the shovel) is about 8 inches. not a ton of dirt is moved - but enough to make for a decent amount of shovel work.

in some cases, i use a rototiller to break up the soil on the pitchfork end. the area also has an abundance of roots from the manzanita that used to call this area home - and the rototiller does an admirable job of blasting through those.

if you look real close, you can see the snap lines i use to keep the new beds aligned with each other.

a bed has been made

well, here you have it - a finished bed. this particular bed is 10 feet in length and will hold approximately 2 yards of soil

you will notice the nickel wires connected between the long sides of the bed - this is my attempt to stiffen the trex - in the event that summer temperatures soften the trex enough to flex and bow it out of shape.

the bottom of the bed is lined with chicken wire to keep out any gopher or mole type critters. although, i havent seen any on my property, i figured now was time to line the bed. could you imagine having to dig out the dirt to line the bed if i did it later? each bed has pvc pipe stubbed into it - connecting back to a controller to automate watering during vacations.

down the road, i plan to place 2x4 redwood along the top edges of the trex to finish off each bed. this will also allow a place to sit when working the beds.

the beginning of the beds - some key learnings

in mid november, i went to the big box store and purchased trex to start building the raised beds. i got to admit, it was a long time coming, but these beds getting built meant that i would definitely have at least 1/2 of my garden in raised beds by spring 2009.

my basic bed design is 4 feet wide, with the length varying depending upon location in the garden. the first 6 beds have the following dimensions (in feet): 4x16, 4x15, 4x14, 4x13, 4x12, 4x11 - and there is a 4 foot walkway between each bed and each bed will be 11 inches deep.

trex has a few quirks that i learned about once i started working with it.

the first quirk i ran into was the flexy nature that trex brings to the table. so getting a straight cut was a challenge. continuing along the lines of flexy, i was concerned that in the summer, the trex would soften a bit and flex more (along the longer side) than optimal - due to the weight of the dirt in the bed. to overcome that flex, i tied the long sides together with wire to limit the outward flex.

the second quirk about trex is its density. after breaking off several screws, i decided pre-drilling was necessary for success. i do recommend the use of screws that were specifically engineered for trex. these screws have a special shaped head, which eliminates the mushing of trex material as the screw is sunk into the board.

shown here is a typical bed that has its first layer prepped. the bed will be getting a second layer of trex to bring it up to its ~11 inch depth.

the corners are buttressed with 4x4 redwood and the planks along the long side of the bed are used to keep the trex layers from separating as well as serving as the mount point for the nickel wire described above.

to trex or not to trex, that is the question

late december found most of the infrastructure in place in my garden area. the water line was installed, bringing water to the lower section of the garden; electrical conduit was installed and the fence was in on three sides - so the next thing was to start getting the beds installed. terracing was necessary to level out the slope - but that will be covered in a future post.

i had been pondering what type of material to use for my beds. i never really considered stone or any concrete type material, as my preference had been rough cut redwood 2x12 material and although i hadnt worried too much about pressure treated wood, i didnt want to use it in my raised beds - its longevity probably wouldnt be much better than redwood - and why introduce any issues, no matter how remote into my food chain.

so, i was leaning very heavily on the 2x12 redwood. at about the time i was ready to pull the trigger on my material purchases - a friend of my wife was having her husband replace the wood on her raised beds. and guess what material she had used... thats right 2x12 rough cut redwood. her raised beds had been in use for about 8 years - which is not bad for ground contact wood.

just using the redwood for the beds was the cheapest route for building my beds - but if you calculate the cost of another set of wood 10 years down the road and various schemes to minimize dirt contact with the redwood (such as sealing the wood, lining the interior of it with plastic or tar paper or some other device to keep the dirt from touching the wood) it soon became apparent that using trex would probably be a better investment in the long run than initially thought. also, given the length of the beds i was planning to install (up to 16 feet long) i would have to splice the redwood for every bed on its long side - making for a less than optimum installation of redwood. trex on the other hand came in lengths up to 16 feet - available at the big orange box store not too far from my house.

as the dollar aspect of trex versus redwood started to become clearer, one day i googled 'ground contact trex raised beds' and got a lot of hits; the most useful link that came up that was a link to the gardenpunks website. looking over their experience with trex beds, i shot off an email to katie (the gardenpunk queen) and over the series of emails asking about trex as a raised bed material, i was pretty sure i would be using trex for my beds.