Raised Beds - the question

Raised beds: leaving aside the subtle questions of dimensions and the complicated analysis of what goes where and assuming we have already decided the benefits of raised beds outweigh the cons the only thing left to decide is material. That is what should the raised beds be made of. Now in theory raised beds can be made of almost anything you like - some things being more practical than others - I suspect lego beds wouldn't stand the internal stress (but then James May's house of lego worked, at least in the short term).

Our raised beds are obviously intended to go in the community garden. Our motto is "form follows function" so they need to be functional, that means hardwearing, durable, non-toxic, longlasting but part of the function of the garden is to look nice and be a nice place to sit so the raised beds can't detract from this by being extremely ugly either. This rules out some of the obviously cheap but rather ugly building materials.

We had decided on railway sleepers - not the recyled/reclaimed type which are generally filled with creosote residue and pretty toxic - but the nice new sort, freshly made untreated but still looking for all intents and purposes like the railway sleepers of yore. However if you start piling these up to get some height into your raised beds, as we intend to do they start to get pretty pricey. Effectively a 1m high raised bed is the same amount of raised bed building materials as four 25cm raised beds and four times the price. - So inexpensive needs to be added to our list of requirements.

This is what the site looked like before we decided to take some positive action!!
Actually at various stages it looked even worse.

Removing the rubbish didn't seem to be enough to stop the habitat so we decided to make it a positive space instead.

We are now seven months and one week into our community garden project and we are well and truly ready to start gardening!!! The weather seems to be warming - well it did and then it snowed again!






Clearing the site was necessary to remove the potentially toxic chemicals donated by the fly-tipping and burning. Removing the first foot and a bit of soil meant a temporary dip in the biodiversity of the site - a thing we hope to rectify in the near future (if you're the now homeless field mouse we're sorry and we hope your new accommodations are working out for you).

We've made lots of progress we've cleared the site (thanks Frank); we've fixed the western boundary stone wall (Thanks Premier Waste, Thompson's and Harle's); we've had the northern wall erected (thanks Parish Council); we've had the eastern fence erected (thanks Frank and Premier Waste) - but so far the site still has no plants on it expect the one remaining hawthorn tree from the ancient hedge line standing sentinel in the north west corner of the plot becrowned with sparrows and dunnocks.

An introduction

Welcome to my Blog.
I recently ran into GrrlScientist and she insisted that a blog is a good thing. Plus this will allow everyone to keep up to date on how our Community Garden is going even if I don't happen to catch them.

The big news is that we have all the plans for the glasshouse (greenhouse) finalised and the plans are off to the factory tomorrow to be made into our very own perfectly formed palace of glass.