Building a raised bed

I've built 4 of these in the past, and so I decided these next 2 should be blogged about :).  The raised beds that I create are 10ft x 4ft and they are 10 inches tall.  I think that 6 inches would be plenty if you have decent soil, but if you're going to be composting a ton, or just adding new soil, then the 10 inches will be nice.  This article is explaining how I build them, and things that i've learned in the process of making these, and i'll have nice photos of you of my latest 2 i'm preparing up to go outside.

Materials Needed

• 2*  10inch x 10 ft boards - i'm using treated in this latest set, i've used just normal pine but i'm sure that will break down in a couple years (which was a great idea for me because my first few weren't very good)
• 1*  10inch x 8 ft board
• 1 box of screws that are 3 or so inches long
• 1 drill with a drill bit roughly the size of the screws you got

Price per box

Not counting the drill and what not the boards ended up costing me $35 per raised bed.  I always build them in sets of 2 because my garden is 20ft wide.

Things to consider

• Most importantly get boards that are straight.  Some of the ones i got were warped, and they still don't lay quite right, it's definitely worth the few minutes to go through and pick out the best boards you can find.
• Lowes, and I believe any other hardware store, will cut the boards for you, make sure that the 2 10ft boards are exactly the same length, and have the 8ft board cut down to 2 4ft pieces.  Just make sure that the 4ft pieces are exactly the same width.  The people at the store are happy to make the cuts for you, and they like making sure their work is good, it's why they work there.  Let them do it :)
• you may need to level out your ground, there are several ways to do this, look into an A frame level, or there's another one that uses hoses and what not which is probably easier to build I just don't remember the name right now :) when i build one to level out my land i'll make a post about it.
• Build the frame on a level surface, a living room works perfectly :).

How to build

This is harder to explain, and easier to come up with your own ways to do :).  The thing to pay really good attention to though is to make sure that you use a square on the corners to try and get as close to 90 degrees as possible.  I will often use one of the other boards because i don't have a square, but anything that you know is a perfect square (or close enough) can be used, just make sure that the edges line up nice and even.

Be sure to drill the holes in the side of the boards where you'll screw it to the other board.  When I didn't do this it made it extremely difficult to screw in, and worse split the wood several times.  Drilling the holes lets u line up things nicely and helps to keep everything even.  Make sure to only tighten the screws when you know everything is lined up nicely.  

My first time creating these I didn't follow any of these points, and my finished products were off by a few inches, which with boxes this large ends up meaning I can't get the boxes to be flat, and soil will often spil out the sides.

What does the finished product look like?

(insert photos here when i find my camera :))

Building a compost bin

Last night I decided to build a compost bin.  We have a large pile in the back yard that has tons of grass and leaves and all my dead plants from this years planting.  He's been kind of composting, but I decided I wanted to build a bin that would help it compost a little quicker.

I'll eventually find the youtube video, but I saw a video that talked about which compost bin works the best.  The one that won the whole thing ended up being a thick plastic hoop, and so I decided to build one just like it.

I started out with plastic garden fencing, this isn't the exact stuff i got but basically is :).  I also got some bailing wire.  Then I cut enough to make a 4 or 5 foot diameter cylender, and used the bailing wire to tie the ends together.  So now, in the end I have a roughly 4ft x 4ft cylendar, a little over a cubic yard.

I had a really hard time getting it to stand up at first, next time i'd likely use either posts, or metal fencing to make it work out better, live and learn i guess :).  However, I kept adding all the stuff in my composting pile and added it to the cylinder.  And found that I have lots of nice compost at the bottom of the pile :), lots of worms, and 1 pretty nasty looking spider.

I'll try and take weekly pictures of the compost pile just to record how things shrink and decompose.

Picture Log:

12-22-2012 (day 1)  The fork shows the height (the bin is 4ft tall)

Basic Succession Planting - Attempt 1

For those interested, here is my Crazy Spreadsheet :) where you can see how I got to the numbers below.

If you're interested I think you can download a copy from there, and just put in your own seeds, and own data.

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How to get a basic set of "free" plantings

Step 1 - Find out when things need to be planted
I've been collecting data and building a cool spreadsheet specifically for my neighborhood (well, specifically for my zone).  While doing so I found specific dates where things are supposed to be planted.  You can also do this based off the first frost date, but Missouri's extension of the Department of Agriculture did that for me :).

Step 2 - Find out when things can be harvested
On the back of the packet, gives me days til harvest.  Using this and the planting date gives me the "harvest" day, or the date where I can pull it out of the ground (give or take).  Note - This isn't a guaranteed date or anything, you may have to leave them in and plant later or just harvest young plants to plant.  Only thing lost though would be the seeds (assuming you compost the plants :)) if you pick them too early to eat.

Step 3 - Put them together
Find the latest date that things get planted.  For example, for me tomatoes are planted 5/10 (tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, peppers and squash).  That's the last thing that I plant (other than my fall crops), and so 5/10 is the date I'm looking for.  I use this date to find anything that will be harvested before that date.  Which included things like radishes, spinach, and lettuce.  So i can get a free crop of any of those plants, by using the space that will be used by the other.  If you look in my lists below I'll give you an example.  I then look for the first thing to be harvested, which is of course radishes, and get all the plants that need to be planted after that day (see the list below if this is confusing).  I have 2 groups, one things that are harvested early, and one list where things are planted late.

Example: Corn is planted on 4/25, and radishes and mustard greens are harvested on or before 4/24.  So i can fill that 4ft x 4ft section with radishes and mustard greens.  Rather than just leave the space to waste.  I would probably also plant some blacked seeded simpson and just either way a little to plant the corn, or harvest it a little early.  Or just plant the corn with the lettuce still growing, since lettuce like shade anyway.  Tomatos are planted on 5/10, so I can plant anything in my top list (i'll probably do the bok choy) and they'll be out of the ground in time for the tomatoes to go in.

Here are my lists:

Plant Type Date to Harvest

radish cherry belle  4/6
radish icicle, short top  4/12
spinach mustard tendergreen  4/24
lettuce black seeded simpson  4/29  
extra dwarf bok choy bok choy  5/4
spinach bloomsdale  5/7
beet detroit dark red 5/13 (included just because hopefuly i can get a crop in, and i like beets more than most of the others :), they're easy to can if I get too many all at once)


Plant Type Date to Plant


garden bean top crop  4/15
peppermint/spearmint  4/15
corn golden bantam  4/25
bean - string blue lake (bush)  5/1
cucumber ashley  5/5
zucchini black black beauty  5/10
eggplant black beauty  5/10
tomato rutgers  5/10
green pepper california wonder 5/10
tomato super boy hybrid 785  5/10
squash waltham butternut  5/10
squash table queen  5/10
tomato beefsteak?  5/10

So my plans are to get a few extra things of spinach, and bok choy,  and mustard greens, and probably learn how to freeze the greens.  But most of the space, for the tomatoes, squash, green peppers etc, will go to beets.  So may will hopefully prove to be a large canning month :).

This is my first year, and hopefully i'll get this more fine tuned.  Things for me to look into.  I keep most plants in my soil blocks before I plant them, and this time probably bumps back their harvest date.  This means that in theory several other plants can be planted and harvested in time.  So hopefully next year I'll get a better variety of extra plants.

My 2012 Garden Plan in detail

Basic Layout
I've gotten a complete layout of what to plant, using growveg.com's ipad app.  It's not the most impressive thing ever, but after 30 minutes of frustration I got it done :).

That's the layout.  It might be slightly difficult to read, but it shows everything.  Notice the layout itself. I chose this layout so that I could:

• Have 2 feet of walking space around each grow bed
• Only have 2 feet of reaching distance for any plant in the entire garden (which is why the boarder is 2ft)
• Also, around the borders will be fences (otherwise i'd have made them 4ft too  :))

Plants I've chosen

It's a pretty large list, once you get started it's hard not to just plant everything you have a seed for, and i've done close to that :).  So here's the list:

• ROW 1
• Beefsteak Tomatos - 8 sq ft, with the trellis.  These are indeterminate, meaning they need to grow up something.  A determinate tomato (or a bush tomato) will be nice for next year when using crop rotation.
• Carrots - Carrots love Tomatos, using companion planting, i put a row next to the tomatos these will probably also be in with the tomatos as they're supposed to help them.
• Green Onions - I found an interesting trick with green onions.  You can plant green onions from the store, after cutting off the green, and they just grow more green every 2 weeks.  You can get like 4 or 5 cuttings.  Worth a try while the seeds grow.  Also, carrots and onions go well together because onions scare off carrot flies.
• Broccoli - 18 sq ft, broccoli need more room, this should be enough for 6 or so plants.  Hope to see how the seeding works on these
• Beets - Beet greens are great for eating, and i'll probably end up canning several of the beets themselves, and hopefully juicing several of them.
• Acorn Squash - I would need 2 plants, but I also planted zucchini which is in the same family (which means i can't save the seeds from either one)
• Cucumbers - will setup a small trellis on the side of the grow bed.
• Oregano - Good for the plants around, scares off the bad bugs
• Radishes - 2 sqft only because i have them, who knows how we'll eat that many :).  i do hope to save seeds from at least 4 or 5 of these plants though
• Spinach - these should be nice and sweet
• Peas - need to plant those soon, early march, will setup some string for them to hang onto.
• ROW 2
• Rutger Tomatos (roma size) - 8 sq ft, with the trellis
• Green Peppers
• Carrots - see above
• Onions - see above, though these ones will be allowed to grow to be bigger 2" bulbs.  You can do 2" or 4", but 2" makes for more yield (evidently), and smaller onions are better since who uses a full onion :).
• Extra Dwarf Bok Choy - These i'm just growing because of how cool they are :).  They grow to be about 2 - 3 inches tall, and they're just tiny bok choy plants.  Will be great in stir fry, or just as a steamed vege.  This is the cabbage family plant I hope to get seeds from this year (only 1 cabbage family should be seeded a year)
• Brussel Sprouts - I'm interested to see how these do.  I probably won't plant them a lot, but maybe if they do well
• Kale - I heard from a friend that these are an awesome edition to a meal, they add almost a meaty texture to a dish and this last year they grew all through the winter (though with our winter this year even tomatos might have lived that long :)).
• onions and carrots - mostly carrots, I'd like to get enough to juice some.  I do want to learn how to do the biointensive companion planting, which I might discuss when I go to actually plant these.  
• Swish Chard - Another green which hopefully i'll be able to juice, and find other ways to cook.  Mainly just checking to see what all grows well, as I hope to eventually get a year round crop of greens for salads
• Tom Thumb Head Lettuce - Just got these free from the place that sold me the Bok Choy, and these are smaller heads of lettuce, which sounds really cool :).  They're about baseball size, and from the ratings they're perfect for a 1 person salad, which my wife does a lot :).  I will definitely be collecting seeds from these
• ROW 3
• Corn - 16 sq ft, on the north side so that they don't shade the other plants.  I hope to see how these do in a square foot garden.  I'm not expecting much, but if they do well, then I will probably continue to plant them.
• Parsley - Does well with corn, and is good for the garden in general for bugs.  I really look forward to being able to pick fresh parsley for spagetti sauce.
• Cilantro - Not that well known of a fact but coriander and cilantro are the same plant.  Generally Coriander is considered to be the seed in America, but really most places call the entire plant coriander (cilantro is spanish).  I hope to be growing a lot of these to seed :).
• Bush Beans, I have 2 sets of these in this row because they work well with a few different things.  These will be great fresh, and canned.  They need to be picked early and often so they produce full amount.  I also hope to inoculate 1 set but not the other.  It's not a great test, but hopefully it will show if inoculating legumes makes much of a difference.  It's supposed to make the plant better for composting (helps the plant pull more nitrogen from the air, which is what plants like to eat), and make more yield.
• Lettuce - 2 types, 1 a headed lettuce, and 1 a leaf lettuce (pick leaves as you go).  Will be interesting to see which one is better for how we use it.
• radishes - i know i know, but I have 2 different types, have to try them both out.
• stevia - evidently these are hard to germinate, we'll see how the soil blockers do.  Should be nice in a an herbal tea to sweeten it up.
• eggplant - my wife loves egg plant, and we'd really like to learn how to cook it.  These are just the normal Black Beauty ones, if we find good ways to eat it, then we'll probably try out more types.  Easy to save the seeds too which is a plus.
• zucchini - I almost got away with not growing these :).  But they're a classic part of a garden, and my wife likes to cook them into zucchini bread, so I gave in.
• mustard - should make for some really good greens, and it'll be interesting to learn how to get the seeds from them.
• butternut squash - I love this stuff :).

Strawberry Beds

I have the strawberries all around the whole thing.  Seemed like the best use of the 2ft space :).  This will allow them to branch out and fill the whole space.  I do plan on adding a few onions to the beds to keep out pests.  I also added some Basil, Garlic, Marigold, and Mint which do excellent jobs of not only blocking out lots of pests, but also making really excellent food :).  The mint and basil are also going to be planted throughout the garden to help.  Here and there.  For example, the green peppers and tomatos love basil, so there will be a plant next to them.

Things to think about in the Future

With the layout I have the plants are close to those things that they work well with, and I tried to make them far away from those things they aren't.  However, it gets even more tricky next year and the next.  I will want to rotate the crops so that the same type of crop isn't in the same place.  I'll need 4 different rotations (should be fun) which should keep down diseases and pests (bugs will lay their eggs near the plants they like, and when the plants aren't there next year they don't do as well). 

Another thing to think about is when things need to be planted, and what to do with the land before and  after.  I hope to plant most of the spring plants again in the same places in the fall after adding more compost.  This will hopefully give me 2 full sets of crops, which will be nice.  Succession planting, another thing I'd like to learn more about in the future.

Future Blog Posts

• Saving Seeds - I'll make a different post for every plant I save.  I should have plenty of video and pictures of the process (hopefuly).
• Planting - I'll show u the garden before and after, and how the biointensive layout works
• Composting - I found a cheap place to buy great compost near by, but I also want to compost any left overs each year.  This is where I differ from normal biointensive gardening, but doing so allows me to grow more veges :).
• More Soil Blocking - I'll have pictures of starting the seeds in the 3/4" blocks
• And More ...

Planning out my garden - Year 1

Welcome, I'm just starting this blog, and starting my first "real" garden at my new house.  Up to now I have only been studying about gardens, but this year gets to be my first.  I've decided to go ahead and start a blog, as every one says that a journal should be kept, and I figured why not share my results with others.  Note to the reader, i'm a programmer, not a writer so please just forgive my ramblings :) and complete disregard for the proper use of the english language.

For this blog post i'm going to 1) go over the basics of my garden, and 2) go over the steps I used to plan out my garden for this year.  My next post I hope to go over what's being planted where and why.

Basics of My Garden

• Plot Size: 24' x 24'

I've decided to do raised beds, following my own version of the biointensive method (it's not overly close to the biointensive, but it is based off what i learned  from the book).  I have 4 raised beds (or have planned to, i'll go over digging in a blog post when I get to do it), 3 are 4ft wide, by 20 ft long, and one is 2ft wide, and wraps around the other 3, and is up against my fence (which is why it's only 2ft wide, so i can reach it).  The 2ft wide one is basically 68ft by 2ft.

• What to plant?

I'm interested in learning how to save seeds, so I'm going with mostly heirloom seeds.  I purchased one of those "end of the world" survival cans, which had like 35 varieties of heirloom seeds.  That is a great way to start, I just went on amazon and got the cheapest one for like $20.  It came with most everything that I want to plant.  Other than those seeds, I have currently purchased: white radishes, dwarf pok choy, kale, mint, and marigolds.


Planning out my Garden
As this is my first year, and it's winter time, I'm only able to research.  And research I have :).  I've learned several different techniques, including companion planting, double digging, intensive gardening, composting, etc.  All of which I hope to someday be able to implement.  This section however is the steps I've gone through to plan out my garden, and hopefully someone else will be helped by looking over the steps I've followed.  It should be noted, that I do enjoy complexity and spreadsheets :), and have used them extensively.

• Step 1:  Create a spreadsheet of all the seeds you have

My spreadsheet goes over the exact name, such as: Rutger Tomatos.  It goes over every piece of detail that is on the seed packet, days to germinate, days to harvest, etc.  I've added all my plants to it, and add more as I get them.  This phase lets me know what I have, so that I can do step 2, which is:

• Step 2: Decide which plants you'd like to have

I started another spreadsheet, of course, and rated each seed from 1 to 5, 1 meaning I have to have it in my garden, and 5 meaning not this year.  I went through the plants and thought about how many plants I'd need to get what I want.  For example tomatos, 4 or 5 plants will probably give me enough tomatos, where as carrots, I want as much as I have room for.

• Step 3: Figure out the Square Footage

This step I decided how much space i'd like to use for my garden.  I found that 24ft x 24ft gave enough room for my kids to still play outside, and left room for my fruit trees to mature.

• Step 4: Design out your raised beds

This is still just a plan, i'm not yet to building the raised beds.  But I took some graph paper and drew a 24 x 24 grid.  I then knew I wanted about 2ft of walking space between beds and beds that were at least 4ft wide.  So I started to draw out my beds.  I went through 2 or 3 plans before resting on my final plan.  I'll post up a design of what I came up with in a later post, but basically it looks like a big C with 3 lines inside it.  The C itself 2ft wide and goes around 3 sides of the perimeter of the garden, and the lines inside are 4ft wide by 20ft long.  With 2ft walk ways around each grow bed.

• Step 5: How much sqft per plant?

Now that I knew the square foot that I had available, I went through my plants to decide how much of each to plant.  This year I want to try as many varieties as I can to see what works, what we eat, what we don't, etc.  So I went through all the plants I gave a 1, and calculated how much sq footage i'd need based on their spacing (found on the seed packet or online if you have the exact seed type).  Example:  I want 4 tomato plants, and they need to be on the edge of the bed where i'm adding trellises, they have a 24inch spacing, so I needed 16sq ft for them.  Bed 1 and 2, on the north side, each have a 2ft x 4ft section for my tomatoes.  I went through all plants like this (though the tomatoes were the only ones that I decided where they'd go in the plan).  I did this until I used up all the sq footage I had available based on my plan.  I got somewhere to the mid 3's or 4's on my priority list before my space was all used up.

• Step 6: I learned about companion planting

I looked all over and decided to do some basic companion planting.  Using sites like gardenate.com (one of my favorites) I found which plants like which plants, etc.  Carrots for example love Tomatos (in fact, so much so that there's a booked named that).  I went through and on a piece of paper, wrote down each plant I wanted to plant, cut them out, and started rearranging plants to be close to the plants they like, and farther away from the plants they don't.  I kept shuffling around until everything looks decent (this can continue to be perfected i'm sure, but it's decent).

• Step 7: Using gardenate.com to setup a timeline

For those who haven't visited gardenate.com yet, you should :), it's excellent.  It may not per a perfect representation for every type of plant, but it really simplifies things.  It has divided up every month and what plants need work each month.  This allowed me to go through and copy the information for the plants that I need so that I had a plan tailored to me.  I haven't gone through my specific seed types to change harvest times or anything, but I'll worry about that next year :).  I simply have a list of what I do what months for the plants I'm planning on planting.  Very nice

Conclusion
At this point, I have the basic plan for what to plant, where in my garden it will be, and what I need to do each month to get started.  I still need to plan out my fall garden, which I'd like to do as much as possible before march gets here and the garden begins, but the plans won't be 100% until I find out what does and doesn't work as expected :).

I tried tons of different ways to plan out a garden, but when I finally followed these steps I was able to create a solid plan that feels planned out enough that I like it.  I'm probably more picky than most, but this part is part of the fun for me.  I'm sure it would have been easier if I'd have just settled with 2 or 3 plant types, but no, I'm going with more like 25 different plant types, everything from carrots, to corn, to bok choy.

Look for future blog posts going over:

• Soil Blocking - looks like a cool way to start all seeds
• Composting - Eventually I hope to start a compost pile
• Building Raised Beds - Pictures and everything for what it takes to actually build the raised beds, including trellises and deep digging
• Planting, tracking, and harvesting
• Saving Seeds - I hope to do as many plants as I can this year, and to record every part I can
• and more (over the next several years hopefully)