Hi there, great site you have here. Just what I've been looking for. :)
OH & I have recently acquired a lottie which needs a fair bit of work before we can really get started on it.
Ideally we would like raised beds, only a foot or so, but we really wouldn't know where to get them from. Any ideas?
Money is a serious issue, isn't it always, so really really cheap planks would be great.
Hi Bun and welcome!!
Mr p and I have been busy making raised beds on our newly(ish) acquired plot. Raised beds of about a foot or so seem a little high?? We have used old roof joists that we found in a skip - these are about 12ft long and about 8in wide so they do not create raised beds as such but rather defined ones. One each side and one cut in half for each end makes a good sized bed.
It really is worth your while to become a 'skip rat' as it's amazing what other people throw away that can be used on an allotment. I always make a point of asking before taking anything and people generally seem amazed that we can make good use of their junk!
We have dug the beds over and thrown in some manure which is busy being worked through the soil as we speak!
I'm sure there'll be others along soon with lots of good advice -have fun and my top tip is to TAKE IT SLOWLY and ENJOY
Plottie :)
Bun, there are lots of posts around about this. I think you can pick up used scaffolding planks quite cheaply, or even free. My Other Half got a whole load of used wood from our local tip/recycling centre on the weekend too, although you have to watch the nails.
Another idea is to do what I'm doing at my lottie - making raised beds with no wood. You just pile the soil up high. I have a bit of a trench on all sides, and have sloping sides to the bed, and I piled the soil in to the middle as I dug. The soil has only ended up around 6 inches above ground level, but with some organic matter, it could easily end up taller.
Welcome to the site, and good luck with your lottie  :)
We are lucky in having a friendly local reclaimer. Every now and then we get a lorry load of timber from 4 x4 up to sleeper size and some as long as 3mt. It's all the wood that has nails in and won't be recycled because you can't use machinery to cut it. It gets rejcted by their usual outlets so they're pretty glad to get it off their hands.
We then store it for anyone to use.
Bun,
Welcome.
Firstly why do you need raised beds?
They are good if the soil is heavy or wet but otherwise just a bed is as good - and better if your soil is light, raised beds under those conditions dry out too quickly.
The beds will raise naturally as you work in organic material but this can be coped with by having a sight domed bed.
If you do definitely need to raise the beds then scrap wood is perfectly adequate, you may need to replace it every few years, but if it's free who cares? We get ours from a local light industrial estate where the large packing cases provide loads of material - they even deliver (it saves them disposal costs) any not used up after a week or so is burned to provide wood ash. Skips are another good source.
Phil
Thanks for the welcome.
I'm in Essex so it's quite heavy clay around here. Also, the lottie seems wetter than my garden which is bad enough.
I think I have found a supplier who will deliver for free & can do a 6"x 1" x 20' x 5' bed for £15. That's without posts & nails, but I work for B&Q & I'm sure I could get some wonky post wood (they do a good line in wonky wood ;) ) quite cheaply.
I have spent the morning on the phone & that's the cheapest I could find. Even old scaffold boards are £5-£6 each around here!
This means that I could do 5 beds for less than £100. It's still enough that we will have to save & scrape for a month or two, but it's cheaper than I thought it would be.
Thanks for your help.
ooo Bun, where in Essex are you? Being an adopted Essex girlie myself and allotmenteering just outside Chelsmford I know how heavy the ground can be, but we are so lucky, for some reason our allotment is amazingly free draining, BECAUSE IT IS FULL OF STONES! ;D ;D ;D
Hi Emma Jane.
I'm from Harlow. :)
Hi Wabbit ;D
Fancy seeing you here, i bumped into Eileen to :)
good luck with it hun, it really is a shame your not closer as John works for a builders merchants and gets wood really cheap, we did our beds with treated gravel boards and the posts where from broken up pallets.
Have fun with it and im sure you will get some 'help' from the little one ;)
Hay Flower. ;D
Once Will gets over his fear of the lottie, he'll be just fine. The 2nd time we went there he was stung in the neck by a wasp & remembers it well. :'(
We've hardly been over there all winter, but will probably go over next week to see if the previous renters have cleared all their rubbish & broken glass away yet. >:(
Doubt it. :-\
I’ve just Googled Raised Beds and there seems to be more advantages than disadvantages, that has pleased me as I have picked that way to go having spoke to peeps about it on message boards. I am hoping to feel less threatened by the chore doing one bed at a time. ???
Here are a few links I found…
http://www.raised-garden-beds.com/Advantages-2.htm
http://www.thegardenhelper.com/raised~bed.html
http://ag.udel.edu/extension/information/hyg/hyg-36.htm
aw bless him Bun :-\ hope he gets over it and had fun growing his own veggies :)
Roy whe have all raised beds and find then so much easier and i get just as much out of the plot :)
We have raised beds at the lotty ... two reasons only ... no dig and nice and easy to manage. They also look much more tidy. Imho :D
Hay Roy. :)
I'm really taking to raised beds!
Your lettuces look very pretty Tim :) What's the dimensions of your raised beds if you don't mind me asking?
Wardy
Hiya Bun
I scrounge wooden pallets off the smaller companies on my local industrial estate. They're usually grateful for me to take them 'cos it saves them cost of disposal. My plumber is so grateful he's even got his staff delivering unwanted pallets direct to my house, normally 5 or 6 at a time.
I have to split the pallets to get the usable wood out but I don't mind. The exercise is cheaper than £30/month gym fees & I always reward myself with chocolate afterwards.
I'm splitting my plot into beds to make it easier to manage. My beds will be 12 foot long & 4 foot wide. So far I've obtained enough wood to make my first eight beds for this year plus almost enought to construct a 7 x 5 foot shed with sloping roof. All other wood will then be used to construct future beds. Plus there's always other lottie holders at my site who are always in need of wood for various stuff so I can always get rid of excess pallets.
I was in your shoes last year so I know how you feel. Good luck & remember to take it slow & steady, you'll make faster progress that way.
CC
A bit under 4'x4', Wardy - it's the way the 'protimed' planks divide best.
I've got two small plastic raised beds of Link-a-bord (one given as a sample) and these are about 3' square. I have put seeds of mixed salad leaves in one and radish and corn salad in the other. No sign of any corn salad but the rest have romped away.Â
The lettuces are now growing beautifully and we've been eating them on our sarnis on the lotty. This photo is just as the seeds began to germinate. Will take another "after" photo next time I go up the plot
These plastic boxes can go on to of each other and they just click together
Wardy (these aren't the expensive ones as seen in the Organic Catalogue) These are about £4.50
Those look good value - where do you get them?
One was a sample and I thought it was so easy to click together that I bought one for £4.50 ish. You can stack them but I chose to use them singly as my salad had grown so fast in the first box that I thought if I added another it would block the light. I then bought a bigger version to save me backache and that cost me about £43. An indulgence I know but I'll get me hammer and saw out when I feel better. The timber raised beds I made were quite dear though as I bought tanalised gravel boards and had to make stakes and then the whole thing so there wasn't that much difference in price in the end. The product is called Link-a-Bord (if you Google you'll find the company which is Armillatox based in Morton, Derbyshire. I collected the stuff myself to save the £10 delivery charge. I am pleased with my boxes and apparently they won't rot, distort, discolour or crack and apparently they retain moisture and heat better so the roots develop quicker (according to the sales blurb) You buy dowels as well to support fleece or netting
Tim Here are my boxes now. They've come on a bit since my first pic :)
.......and split into 2 ;D
I've posted this on another thread somewhere, but if you can get hold of any of these 'sides' for pallets, they are useful for raised beds also.
(http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y21/meatpaste/DSCF0084.jpg)
Great box there pete! Lotty bloke near me doesn't grow much just breaks up pallets for a hobby. I think I'll pay him a call ;D
For raised beds, DO CHOOSE YOUR VARIETIES CAREFULLY!
Another stupid mistake.
Tim - this is where a lot of my budget went this year - lovely link-a-bord. 8) I bought them direct from the manufacturer - very friendly, efficient service. Their web site is:
http://www.linkabord.co.uk/
I have 2 raised beds, 3 x 1 m of link-a-bord. Another good idea is to use the large square plastic storage boxes available from pounds shops, Wilkos, etc - I have my toms in those, you can just see on the photo below (red and green boxes). They are dirt cheap, just need to drill holes in the bottom for drainage.
(http://www.charliefoulkes.com/images/garden-summer-2005/veg-patch-2005.jpg)
Yes - they look great value. Ours are just planks.
But my point, of course, was that one lettuce is hogging most of a metre square bed - not a good choice??
Heh. I think I must have posted at the same time, I didn't see the lettuce! Bit extravagant, yes.
Planks are great - traditional look etc, but then you have to have someone to nail then together for you. Someone good at carpentry. Someone who won't take several months to do it?! ;) In other words it was much easier to get the link-a-bord, lol.
Not only easier, but actually cheaper than pressure treated planks.
Quote from: tim on July 14, 2005, 16:46:22
But my point, of course, was that one lettuce is hogging most of a metre square bed - not a good choice??
But Tim, that one lettuce looks like the happiest lettuce in the land! ;D ;D
A better picture?
I know they grow things big in Australia - where this comes from - but this is ridiculous. That's a 4' bed!!
Raised beds are a blessing they have solved our probs of waterlogging just need to wait for the winter for the real test as soil is relatively dry at the mo. We used scaffold planks - 6(used) were donated and even dropped off by friendly scaffolder looked up in Yellow pages (he got a crate of beer for his efforts), we bought 12 more from a company in Ware (Herts) for £6 each. We think this was well worth the investment this year. Each board is 13ft so we used 2 complete planks for the sides, then chopped up one to make the ends (plus a bit left over) so our beds are now nearly 4m long and just over 1m wide. We then filled with top soil (about 2 tons spread between them) - but this was just a treat really as had worked in sharp sand and grit into existing soil to help drainage and plants still would have quite happily gone into that.
There is a scaffold company over in Loughton that also do them for much the same price. It is cheaper than buying timber from DIY stores and the quality of wood is so strong they aint going anywhere for the next 50 years! We joined them at the corners with blocks of wood salvaged from skips/industrial estate recycling place.
Best thing we've done this year I reckon, took about 2 weekends to do and a very sore hammered finger - not mine he he he - my boyf's! Everyone has remarked at how nice is looks but not just that, everything is growing so well this year.
good luck and mind your fingers and thumbs!
Thanks for the tips SPea!
I think we will give that a go on our lottie. Shame about your boyf's thumb, I wrote to someone earlier about that and said that you should get some herbal remedies on it to get the swelling down - they work a real treat. hope he's feeling better now :)
BP
Quote from: Baked potato on July 20, 2005, 18:12:31
Thanks for the tips SPea!
I think we will give that a go on our lottie. Shame about your boyf's thumb, I wrote to someone earlier about that and said that you should get some herbal remedies on it to get the swelling down - they work a real treat. hope he's feeling better now :)
BP
it was his finger and is a lottie better now ha ha! :D :D ;D ;D thanks for asking
H Ha but you get the idea.
Going pottie on the lottie ;D ;D :o :P ;) ;D
My 6" gravel board raised beds aren't high enought so have to look at making them higher. The link a bord bed (although an extravagance for me) is working well and the produce in it is going great guns, considering the soil was just piled in complete with weeds (which has proved a nuisance) My husband filled the bed I just get to do the maintenance >:(
After much thought, I've gone for Linkabord -for my next bed - 1mx2m - price seems the best.
Now - knowing that I don't have access to lots of bulk things, what are the suggestions for the best fill for the bed?
Welcome new member.
:) Fellow Essex Girl here EJ, near Wakes Colne. Blooming high heels stick like mad in this Earth its heavy clay with about 25-30% flints in some pockets. No carrots grown this year so next I am on to some raised beds.
My link a bord bed has been successful and I'm still cropping Paris Market carrots, spring onions, beetroots, red onions and managed to get a row of nigella Jekyll Blue all the way round the edge.
I made the raised bed as my back was v painful at the start of the gardening year so I sited the link a bord box over where I'd had a bonfire and then put thick cardboard in the bottom and then weedy sods which I'd taken from the first raised bed I'd made last November. I got as many of the nettles and couch grass stems out as I could. I also added my own homemade compost and leaf mould. My husband sieved some of the soil and I raked it and levelled it off and it looked quite a good tilth for quite a bodge job. The only problem with it and I envisaged it were weeds which were in the sods to start with. It meant I had rather more weeding to do than I'd have liked as the veggies started to develop. My link a bord box is two runs high with braces which go across the middle to give it extra support. I now have to think what goes in when the first lot of veg has all been cropped - late potatoes is an idea :)
Hi
Great minds think alike... I too have been busy constructing a couple of raised beds.
I aquired some decking off-cuts off my son-in-law (I always knew he would come in handy one day...took him fourteen years though)
I used some angle iron in the corners (Dexion) and screwed them to the timber, the corner posts penetrate the soil by approximately nine inches
I have dug in four bags of sharp sand into each bed and tilled this in well...just got to add some compost now.
Derek
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v712/Wigston/Raisedbeds.jpg)
:o Wow Derek :o those are sound man, so simple with a bit of Dexion too, very neat. ;)
I must keep an eye out for peeps ripping up there old decking, I hope it's a fashion thing and they start dumping them soon. ;D
Well done 8)