2 questions about raised beds

Hi. My husband just agreed to build a raised flower bed for me but he wants to put it on a section of our back yard where we burned stuff 3 or 4 times. This will be a full-sun perennial bed. We're planning to remove at least 4-6 inches of soil and replace with healthy soil from another section of the yard where nothing had been burned. Then he wants to build the bed like we saw on Gardening by the Yard (HGTV show) where he laid ground cloth down and then put the wooden frame on top of that and then fill in with soil and compost.

Here are my questions:

1) How deep does the bed need to be since the ground cloth will limit the depth of the roots. Or are there any plants that need a bit of depth for roots?

2) Do you think our plan would help us to avoid any negatives that might've been caused by the fact that we used it as a burn pile 3 or 4 times? We only used it to burn limbs and other yard debris after Hurricane Katrina.

Anything else you might want to add about planting in raised beds would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Stephanie

About 12 to 16 inches deep should do for flowers. Allow for a couple inches of mulch.


I would not remove any of the soil just because you burned yard debris on it, won't hurt things a bit.

Have Fun, kdcon

You could use layers of wet newspaper instead of ground cloth. The price is right and it does a great job of blocking whatever is underneath. The best part is that worms go right through it and you want lots and lots of worms.

We actually had a whole roll of ground cloth given to us by a friend who is moving from a house to an apartment. It was free so that's why I was going to use it. But if I need worms, should I reconsider? How do the worms help?

I would save the ground cloth to put underneath a path, flagstone patio, or something along those lines where you're not going to be planting and use the newspaper instead.

What thickness do you use with the newspaper? (i.e. how many sheets?)

I use 7 or 8 sheets, just to make sure weeds don't pop through them too quickly. I wouldn't dig out the dirt underneath either. :-)

Yes, aren't ashes beneficial in your compost? I think you would want to keep the ashes too.

Burning yard debris there, if it was only natural material, would have made the area much richer so don't remove any of the original soil before you put the raised bed in.

If you can, loosen it up with a tiller or spading right before you put the raised bed on top. That will make it easier for deep rooting plants to get into it.

I agree with the 'use newspaper instead of ground cloth'. Use only the non-glossy parts. Skip the sunday adds because of the chemicals in them. When you put them down, overlap them about 3" and wet them down good with a hose. Wetting them down makes them stay in place well and also hastens their decomposition which is why they're so much better than ground cloth.

The newspaper breaks down and adds organic matter to the soil plus it lets your plants roots thru to that nice soil you burned for them.

Jeff

Why would you bother putting down any fabric or newspaper? The ash won't do any harm unless like Jeff suggested, there were chemicals or painted wood burned. If you just burned clean wood or yard debris there, I wouldn't worry about it at all. After all, when there is a forest fire, Mother Nature doesn't bother to put down any ground cover before reforestation.

Well, the purpose of the ground cover would be to keep weeds out. And the newspaper suggestion, I'm assuming, was to be an alternative to that so that worms could get in.

The thing I'm confused about is if worms can get in, then couldn't weeds?

Or am I misunderstanding the purpose of the newpaper layer?

The weeds get through eventually, but in the meantime the worms like the paper. Also, it is easy to poke holes in the newspaper in case you decide to plant something big there, like a tree or bush. If you put down weedblocking-cloth it's a lot harder to do that.