i sent a spade thru my water pipes for a sprinkler system, and after capping it off, decided to move the whole little thing away from those pipes, and get creative as well. Am changing from a 4x4 square 6" hi to a deeper raised bed that will end up abt 46" wide and 124" long, -that isnt my query, and this is for home use not commercial- there is no sense using wood here-not even cedar, so we are going to use cinder brick, or a stucco face cinder brick, and I know to line the sides with a stiff plastic (that torn up ol swimming pool may come into use here) we have hardware fabric to lay on the ground in hopes of foiling the voles/moles and other ground varmints that allow air to my plant roots , but how deep does the dirt need to be above the hardware fabric? and anything else I may have missed? just basics, and I plan on checking into emitter systems-not sprinklers...
ok, need feedback on mats
I have 12" or more of dirt in my raised beds.
Here is the bed I have just finished.
You can see the soil is tall like the 12" brick edges.
a better view from the top
Thank You drthor, we settled on cinder bricks edging, and laid the wire mesh abt 5" under-its to hopefully keep out the moles/voles, its slo, the g'kids are helping-my back siezes after about 15 spades, but the ground is perfect to work right now. The pieces to lay soaker hose are waiting to be assembled, discovered it was where we had burned old sweet gums and things around 10 yrs ago-the soil looks awesome. It is sandy tho, so I am going to add in some things to the dirt I still have to buy, and peat will be part of it as well as wood mulch that will break down slower, I love your trails and terraces, they are gorgeous! No pix yet- I am still smoothing the dirt to set the cinder brix flat, chuckle
Here in DFW area the major nurseries tell you to NOT use peat moss on your raised beds mix at all.
In our extreme heat the peat moss will dry out.
My girlfriend didn't listen to me or the professionals. Instead she follow the "Square Foot Gardening book" and spent a lot of $$$ on their mixture.
Her raised bed in the middle of the summer heat was a solid BRICK, even if she did water every day !!
Result = she left the bed to the weeds !!
Good luck to you.
Keep posting !!
PS. The pvc pipes you see in the pictures are always up from December untill April. Just in case there will be a freeze.
In the new bed, at the end of next week I will transplanting out my tomatoes and they will be under a plastic hoop pvc house.
Looking forward to see your pictures and harvests.
DFW soil is old black clay gumbo, and chalk- I remember when most of those homes were growing crops, here in Houston it is sand,
chuckle, loamy type stuff, I have a hill of yr ol horse manure, and am going to have to buy some soil as well, but I wasnt using any garden mixes, and we are going 2 cinder brix hi, the stooping is being left behind. first year, we havent decided what goes in it, gonna have to sort out the 'needs more water-needs less water' and the hts on stuff we like to have yr round- parsley, rosemary, thymes, oreganos, garlic, onions, and tomatoes and peppers, and some lettuce as a trial, it is begun, chuckl
well, grandkids are home, i cant upload pix- my bandwidth shrank, chuckl
Kit I only have one cinder block raised bed and it has been in a really long time but I bees thinking I started with a solid layer of newspaper but by now I think it is just full of Sweet Gum roots... as each wooden bed rots away I am replacing with plastic barrels cut lenght ways ..This is DWs bed now mind you she did not make the bed just selected the plants
looks like my dau idea of where plants go under trees...the flowers are gorgeous tho. here on this property we not only have those darn sweetgum roots-we have pine roots, potato vine(woodbind or smilax) muscadine roots, poison ivy/oak, elm, 3 diff oaks,1 lone dogwood, native holly trees, native wax myrtles, countless yet undiscovered wild pea vines that show once in awhile, umm theres another native tree- candlewax? we fight all the time, they carved out a hole in the bottom of a creek for their home, I warned her, shake head amused, hard headed as her mom...think I'll retry those pix from this laptop this mornin while kids are at school
nope wont upload, wont even preview, sigh
one
two? yah, loadin very slo, one at a time -befoere this mornings rain, chuckl
very very nice.
You have lots of room there ...
you must make a longer bed !!
Bigger the better !!
Now I must disagree drthor I like smaller beds ,getting on in years and don't want any bed I can't reach from one side to the other a case in point my wife's tulip bed pictured above
my favorite width of the bed is 3' ... I agree with you ...
your wife will love you more if she can plant more flowers ... serioulsy
If I could I would remove all the grass in my front yard too ... I did it in the back !!
weeee
kitt, you will love the cinder blocks for planting all sorts of goodies- strawberries, lettuce, onions, chives, cilantro, parsley-I keep cutting celery going all year in mine. And flowers here and there are nice- Good work!
Wash state has acid soil, a rain every day and awesome drainage, Houston will probably never grow good celery-but I ate my 2 lone asparagus sprouts this week, hehe, may have to relocate em
Breaktime, took 1 bale 2.2 cu ft sphagnum moss, turned it into the sand on top of the hardware fabric, then turned that into 5 bags of Texas compost from Lowes- I look like I hugged each bag of compost too. I ran out of the clean loam I wish to use, so, I am going to pull this out even in the bed, and bring in a pickup bed of topsoil at a place that is fairly close to us, then make the top half a richer mixture of dirt to compost than the bottom half. I also have 9 bags of what I term 'cow' to mix in as my topsoil when we finally get to the last half of this project.
My area of WA is alkaline- we are high desert with very little rain. The coast is probably a lot different.
Ahhh, I knew I'd been to Richland recently- I was in Pasco, the area I consider to be the backs of the giant sphinxes, Yeah, that gets scrubbed by winds and has to water to have anything, you guys are as dry as we were last summer, even the snows and ice fogs have been missing, and where I've seen the coast it is totally opposite of you...