Last March is when we (my husband and my son) built our raised beds for vegetables.  There was a helpful program on t.v. at the time which went through six weeks of getting a garden started. It was a nice motivator to keep us on schedule for having the beds ready for late spring planting.  I had taken a few organic gardening courses,  watched the gardening program, read a few blogs, bought and read some books, done everything bar get my hands dirty.  So it was finally time to just dig in and give it our best shot!

To work comfortably in the garden I didn’t want to have the beds wider than 4 feet. The height worked out to 18 inches with stacking the wood by two.  We decided on 12 feet long and divided them in half to give us 4 plots of 6 feet by 4 feet.  We bought rough untreated wood, despite the lumber yard worker’s insistence that I needed to have treated wood.  I’d rather skip the chemicals seeping into my vegetables!  There were some stakes bought as well at the lumber yard.  It cost about 140 euro for the wood, while our topsoil cost 50 euro.   Now it was time to build the beds!

After they were built, we laid out a bunch of newspapers and cardboard  on the ground to kill the grass and keep it down.  On top of cardboard we layered compost and then put on the topsoil. We finished it off with a final layer of compost.   Voila! Raised beds ready for planting!

Since last year we added a cold frame for starting plants. We used an old door with glass for the lid.  We also added a smaller raised bed (for all of those extra seeds I bought!).