Raised Beds -help

[buddha nature]

Hi everyone
My name is Gez and moved to Gloucestershire a year and a half ago and would absolutely love to make use of our small but lovely garden. I have had some success with planting flowers and now would really like to start growing veg successfully by buying or making a raised bed. I have tried growing a few carrots and rocket in amongst the flowers this year but with only a few rocket leaves to show for my efforts. I do have an incredible amount of ants which could be the reason why nothing is growing that well this summer?
Anyway, to the raised beds - I would like to put one on the patio and have found a website selling plastic ones which are fit for this purpose. However I have some spare wood from an old bed and would love to recycle this by knocking it together to form a square - would this work?
Many thanks

[tootles]

Hi everyone
I have some spare wood from an old bed and would love to recycle this by knocking it together to form a square - would this work?

Yup!!!!

Also I am pretty sure that the ants don't eat the veg - just the dead stuff and small critters around it (ie blackfly and greenfly).

[Demeter]

Yup!!!!

Also I am pretty sure that the ants don't eat the veg - just the dead stuff and small critters around it (ie blackfly and greenfly).

Ants don't eat those flies - they guard them! (They eat their sugary poo, so they try and keep the aphids alive and pooing...)

You can knock up a raised bed on the patio, but you'll be limited to the depth of the raised bed, which means there will be a lot of veg you can't grown or not very well (depending how deep it is, of course).

I reckon you should have another go at growing them in the main part of the garden. If the carrots didn't come up at all, the most likely culprit is slugs, I would think - have you got slugs? Use your search button if you need ideas for combatting them, there are loads of threads on how to keep slugs off your veg.

Most importantly - welcome to the vine - and, whereabouts are you in this fine county of ours?

[GeorgieP]

We grow veg in both the side beds with the flowers and in three main raised beds. Those in the raised beds do miles better so I would definitely recommend. We dug up part of the lawn to make the raised beds, using wood and added some manure.

I found that slugs have so many places to hide amongst the flowers - clear up any old leaves regularly as they love to hide undernearth!

[snohare]

The formic acid secreted by ants stops seeds germinating. Where they have trails, they will also kill off any tiny seedlings. ( I don't know how, but it's definitely not scythes or Glyphosate ! ) But on the plus side, they probably eat slugs....most things that can't outrun 'em come to grief. And they tend to live where the soil is bone dry and acidic, which is not good for most plants, so it may be coincidence that not much is surviving where they are.
All my raised beds are recycled wood, works a treat. The higher the better. ( But stop before you need stepladders, mind ! ) The plastic Link-A-Bord ones are supposed to be very good for insulation because of their twin wall construction, and they are made of recycled plastic, so in principle I support the idea of plastic ones, just can't afford them myself until enough people but them to bring the unit price down.
Hope that helps.

[Woofster]

I would definitely vote for wooden raised beds. They are cheaper and just as easy to assemble. I buy planks of 8' x 4' planks (6" x 2") cut to size by my friendly timber merchant and just bang 'em together with a few nails. They have held up well so far. I used some recycled wood for some but it worked out more expensive ! I also have a few Link-a-bord beds but they were not that much easier to assemble and they were more expensive. They also have niftly little hidey holes in the corner where snails love to hide.
Good luck with your veg growing - you'll be hooked before you know it.

[snohare]

The Rolls Royce of wooden raised beds of course is tongue and groove floorboards. Thick enough to take a substantial weight of soil, you can add extra ones on top to raise the height when needed, then take them off when digging out tatties, adding manure etc, and the T&G bits mean no beasties/weeds can sneak in the inevitable cracks... (This is why I usually use screws and extra long corner posts on my raised beds; I am forever adding/subtracting a board to use it as a cold frame, tattie bed, etc.)
Can you hear me drooling ?

[darkangel6976]

hey there
yep it does-we did exactly that-3 times and the raised beds are great as they add depth and like you said its recycling!! we also put a some weed bed control down first before the soil/compost. My hubby added me the 2 extra ones yesterday in an hour. its cheaper than the raised beds sets you buy and you can always paint the outside to a colour of your choice too. we used lawn edging as a divider to divide up the rows of veg. Our garden is a weird shape and we have 2 children but I still utilised the space-at least with wood you can make it the shape you need. Mine has two triangles with a rectangle inbetwen them!! You can make a raised bed as high as you want-we made ours high enough to grow carrots-the Autunm King type 2 which are long rooters! You may need a little chair to sit on while you dig or sow but at least you aren't restriting what veg you can grow!
hope it goes well and it will be well worth it! I would definatley look into getting rid of those ants though!!!