Starting the Vegetable Garden – Part 1 – The Raised Beds

DISCLAIMER: In this article, you will read about the things I have done as I learn about gardening for food. This article is in no way telling you that these are the right/correct/only way to start your vegetable garden because I only know enough to logically guess that something I do might turn out okay should Mother Nature deem me worthy of some success. Basically, please read the following article with a 90% entertainment and 10% information point of view. If something does work extremely well, I’ll let you know. If you try something I’ve mentioned here, please leave a comment and let me know how it goes!

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Now that the flower gardens are in place on the “for show” side of the house, it’s time to turn my attention to food production on the “utility” side. If you follow me on Facebook, you may have seen my post about the raised beds we built in preparation for growing some vegetables. This article will catch you up on how it’s going.

This was my first attempt at food production since my very sad attempt when we were first married. How bad could it have been, you ask? Let me just say that hot off the heels of buying our first home together and creating a beautiful backyard oasis – with no room for vegetables – I got the bright idea that I wanted to try to grow some food! So, we decided to plant the food amongst the landscape plants. Little did I know that this is actually a thing! It’s called Foodscaping. And I did it completely wrong!

One of my biggest mistakes was that I gave almost zero thought to the quality of the soil or the location of the plants. I fit the food in spaces willy-nilly and assumed they grow well just like the landscape plants. I didn’t consider lighting, growth habits of the surrounding plants, or rabbits! The only things that weren’t devoured by the voracious city bunnies living under our deck, were the tomatoes. Something else came and ate my barely ripe tomatoes under the cover of darkness, leaving trails of tomato guts in their wake. We’ve been supermarket foragers ever since – until now. 

YouTube Channels to Learn About Gardening

Now, armed with dozens of hours of You-Tube education, I think I’m a little better equipped to give food growing another try. In case you’re interested, the YouTube Channels I’m learning from are (in no particular order): 

1. Huw Richards 
2. Grow Veg
3. Gardening in Canada
4. Epic Gardening 
5. MIgardener

Of course before I can get too deep in the green stuff, we need a place to actually do the planting!

Building the Garden Beds

Originally we thought we’d have tons of space – right up to the forest edge – but a revised drainage plan drastically reduced the space with an unplanned stone swale and a steeper slope away from the house than we anticipated. Not ones to be defeated, we did a little pivot and reworked our ideas. And only because we have so many other projects lined up, it will likely be at least a couple years before my full food garden vision is in place. Did you notice I didn’t say completed? That’s because I fully anticipate adjustments and more revisions to be made as I learn. 

This is the information we started with: 

1. Knowing that the fill used to backfill and grade around the house would be completely unusable for vegetable/fruit gardens, we had planned from the start to employ raised beds for our food gardens. 
2. We wanted to build the raised beds to be high enough to be accessible when we’re no longer so agile. With all we have going on, some days it feels like that could be tomorrow!
3. We didn’t see the need to invest in fancy steel beds – not to mention I’m not fond of the look of them – when we have plenty of access to wood that’s scrap from its intended use but still good for repurposing. 
4. Because we’re using repurposed boards, that may not be the best for having damp soil against them for the long term, we needed to find a way to construct the beds that works for the plants and will also preserve the wood for as long as possible. 

After more research on building raised garden beds, hugelkultur and self watering beds seemed to be the most viable options but we’d need to tweak either one to make it work for us. Let’s look at the pure methods for a moment … 

Hugelkultur Gardening

Good ole Wikipedia defines Hügelkultur as a horticultural technique where a mound is constructed from decaying wood debris and other compostable biomass and is planted as a raised bed. Considered a permaculture practice, advocates claim that the technique helps to improve soil fertility, water retention, and soil warming, thus benefiting plants grown on or near such mounds.

My sister and Brother in Law have created Hugelkultur beds at their home and I must say … they are interesting to look at and appear to be extremely productive. Here’s a peak at what a completed bed looks like:

Self Watering/Wicking Beds

A self watering/wicking bed is an irrigation system devised by Australian inventor Colin Austin, where water is held below the growing medium and wicks up into the soil. This low-tech system is designed to increase food production while using approximately 50% less water than traditional irrigation by utilizing underground water reservoirs filled with decomposing organic matter and the process of evaporation. You can see it used in applications from commercial fields to indoor potted plants. This method reduces evaporation and fungal disease, promotes deeper roots, and deters pests that seek moist soil surfaces. It also helps retain nutrients as they are not washed into the water table before plants can access them.  

Our Hybrid Raised Beds

Knowing how each of these beds is constructed, we came up with a bit of a hybrid for our raised beds; it has the watering system of a wicking bed and the components of a Hugelkultur bed. Creating a watering system of wicking bed was attractive as it will protect the wood structure from direct contact with the wet soil. It also allowed us to use up a small pile of wood waste that wasn’t cleaned up after clearing the lot. 

The beds are deep enough that to have filled them completely with soil would have been silly as the roots of most plants won’t ever reach the bottom. Plus, we still had a pile of waste wood that hadn’t been removed after clearing the lot. I do have some concerns about the logs/waste wood hanging out in the wet zone and maybe not allowing the water to wick up properly but we’ll see how it goes. 

To begin, we built 2 – 3’x7’ raised beds last fall so we’d be ready for spring planting. That gives me 42 square feet, plus a few planters to work with. So far I’m a little glad that we’ve built only two raised beds this way, and that we won’t have time to build more for this season. This will allow us to see how they work and make adjustments if needed for the next beds. In the meantime any additional planting space needed will be managed using containers. 

Our First Year Results & Lessons with Raised Beds

Now it’s October and our food growing is nearly complete for this season. It’s time to reflect and learn from our first year of production. In a nutshell … it was ALL about learning, trying and trying again. Oh and apparently this has been one of the most odd growing seasons in quite some time – so not all the failures are entirely mine! Here’s what I’ve learned so far about our raised beds: 

Something went a little wrong with either the design of the beds or the execution.

The beds didn’t retain water as expected and they never reached the fill level on the piping system. A few months into operation we ran water into the fill pipe until it reached the fill level – THAT part worked like a charm! With one bed we could see instantly that there was a puncture through the plastic on one side as water started weeping between the boards. The other bed returned to it’s original water level overnight. 

Without taking the whole bed apart I can only guess that either the stone or the wood debris we put in punctured the plastic sheet. Neither one would surprise me since we didn’t use proper clear drainage stone (round stone), we just used what we had on hand. And I might have gotten a little sloppy and been a little rough placing some of the wood in too. 

Whatever the cause, it meant that I had to water the beds by hand. Even with that though, they did seem to retain a fair amount of moisture beneath the surface so I didn’t have to water as much as I thought I might in this scenario. But then again, maybe it just rained often enough to save me some trouble.

We’ve tweaked/simplified the design of our next two beds to eliminate the stone, and we took much more care in filling the bottoms with wood debris. I’m not sure there’s much we can do about the first two beds at this point as I’m not bothered enough to empty them and try again … yet.

We need some form of structure over the beds to allow for frost cloth, bug netting, shade cloth or possibly even a poly-tunnel option. 

You can see more about the why in my next installment where I go over the planning, seed starting and more lessons learned in our first year. 

We’ve researched our options – mostly using PVC conduit – to create the arch and a host of tactics for creating the covers. We didn’t really love the aesthetic of those though so we put our heads together and came up with this design. I’ll go into more detail on this once we put it to use next spring.

Dollar Store laundry hampers and some weed blocker fabric makes a great tomato planter!

Initially I was planning to purchase some of the fabric grow-bags that were trending this year but I saw two big drawbacks to them: they’re expensive if you want it to last and I just didn’t see how they could look very good after even one season. And have you seen the price of nice, large garden planters?! I just couldn’t spend that kind of money for planters that I wouldn’t need in a year or two. So, a trip to my friendly neighbourhood Dollar Store solved the problem. I purchased 5 laundry hampers, one roll of landscape fabric and I was set! If I don’t have a need for the hampers later, I can always clean them up and donate them. My tomatoes seemed quite happy in them. I even planted one plant from seed in the early summer and it was one of my best producers!

Conclusion – so far

While I can’t yet speak to my skills as a food gardener, I can say I’m well pleased with what I’ve learned so far and our progress on the raised beds – even though they weren’t a smashing success – and I’m looking forward to testing out our tweaks and improvements next year.