In an attempt to make our garden more productive (and reduce the area of lawn we have to mow) we decided to create a raised bed on one of the sections of lawn. We recently purchased some scaffold planks from Southampton Wood Recycling Project and some 2 by 2’s for the corners.
We screwed the planks into the corner posts and not into one another as this meant we could go in from the front of the planks and not into the end grain. We also lined the sides of the bed with pond liner to increase its life span a help hold in water/soil.
The finished bed is 3 planks high which is quite high but it means that we will not have to bend down too much to work on it which is nice. We are also trying out a new (to us) technique of Hugelkultur so lined the bottom of the bed with logs that we had lying about with some other bits of wood and garden cuttings on top. After the wood we layered straw and then soil on top of that.
We have not finished filling the bed yet but are looking for a good source of manure/soil to fill up the top of the bed. We are looking forward to seeing what this bed can produce over the next few seasons.
