Raised Beds - Advice

[dominic10]

This site is absolutely full of information and advice. I have a raised bed for asparagus which I made from freecycled breezeblocks. Welcome and good luck with your raised beds.

[taff]

If you have a lot of stones or bricks or cement blocks, use those to edge beds with too.
You need a minimum really of 6 inches of something to plant into, and deeper for those deeper rooted veg obviously.
Have a google for hugelkultur, it's a way of useing the tree roots if you are going to dig them out.
Lasagna gardening is also worth a search.
Decide whether you want your garden to have a certain look before you decide what you're going to use for bed edging.

[Chocolate8me]

Hi Veggiemad,

I made my own raised bed and it cost me £25 in wood & screws. It's 6'x4' and 12" high (2x6" width planks). I put a membrane down that we already had but put lots of holes in it for wormys to do their thing making the soil nice. We have a eucoliptus tree (sorry for the spelling) that was cut down and is now regrowing, apparantly veggies don't like them, hence the membrane.

I used 75% sieved soil (very laborious) and 25% Multi-purpose compost. The soil is lovely and soft with no stones, inevitebly weeds are easy to pull out. Bear in mind that the soil is not ideal for the likes of sprouts though as they like solid soil for the roots.

Another thing to watch out for is whatever you plant has to like the sun if you stick with the location at the top of your garden ;o)