Hey friends! I'm Ellen with Harmony Realty and today we are visiting my home
garden. This is my husband, Timothy. He did all the heavy lifting to repurpose our
old deck into this beautiful raised bed garden. Last year we had to tear down the
old deck on the back of our house
because the soil was sloping toward the house and causing a set of concrete
steps to lean against the foundation wall. And it was causing us some problems.
So we had to pull down the old deck and build a new one. Then we had all this
lumber left over and I didn't want to just throw it away. I'd been really
wanting to start a garden so we decided to repurpose it into raised beds to
plant a vegetable garden! Now before we could start planting we
needed to prepare the area where we were going to build beds. It was kind of a
mess. There was a huge pine tree that we needed to take down and there were some
horribly invasive vines and weeds that took some heavy labor to remove. Also
this area was used by the former homeowner as a second driveway so you
can see that underneath all of the weeds and pine straw it's packed with gravel.
That's the reason we decided that this would be a good place for raised beds,
because we're going to be bringing in all of the soil that we plant the vegetables
in. This 50 foot by 30 foot area will eventually be home to anywhere from six
to ten raised garden beds, plus blueberry bushes, an herb garden and a wildflower
pollinator garden. Before we can build the beds we've got some work to do! Day
One: On the first day we got to work clearing all of the weeds... we're turning
the soil and uprooting the weed roots. This is the area in the back of a garden
that was covered by invasive vines. There used to be a big pine tree back here
that was completely covered in these vines before we cut it down to make room.
We had to enlist the help of teenagers to help get all the vines removed. It was
a lot of work! Now we're all clear and we're ready to start building. This is a
bed we did a little while ago as a test run. Now we're going to go ahead and
measure and cut all the deck lumber. I built the beds the way I did because I
was limiting myself to the lumber we had on hand.
We had some eight inch boards and some six inch boards to work with. Of course
if you're buying lumber you can order whatever size you need. Deeper is better
because it gives the roots plenty of room to grow. But at the minimum you want
your beds to be at least six inches deep. We used the 8 inch boards
by themselves to make a few beds but we took the six inch boards and doubled
them up to make 12 inch deeper beds that can be used for root vegetables. We're
going to be planting some potatoes and some half long carrots that'll do really well
in those beds. Normally you might use a post in each of the four corners and
screw the boards into the post however I didn't have posts so I joined the two
six inch boards together in the center with the scrap of lumber and then nailed
the boards directly into each other to make the square bed. Why did you use a
pressure nail gun instead of something else? I only used a nail gun because I
was doing all the work by myself and it was easier to use the nail gun to get
the board's lined up properly. Then I went back and used decking screws to
attach them more solidly together. The nail gun alone would not actually hold
the boards together. If you have somebody to help you that can hold the boards
while you screw or while you nail, that works just as well.
Day Three: Once we had all the lumber cut, the beds made and laid out in the garden,
we could get the kids to help work on the rest of the weeds and start
preparing to fill the beds with compost.
We lined each of the beds with cardboard. This should help kill any unwanted weeds
and seeds and will eventually break down and add nutrients back into the soil. If
you've ever seen a piece of cardboard lying around for a while, maybe it's been
rained on and started to decompose a bit, if you picked it up you might have
noticed that insects and worms are drawn to this kind of decomposing material.
We're counting on those worms to help break down the cardboard and in the
process they'll leave behind their waste which is called worm castings and that
waste has a lot of nutrients. Theoretically if we put thick layers of
decomposing materials over this gravelly ground the worms will help us turn it
into good soil that'll grow something! Even if it doesn't work out that way we
should still have enough good soil that we've brought in that our veggies will
do really well. Whether you can see it on the video or not the garden is somewhat
steeply sloped and I couldn't bear to look at unlevel beds but I also didn't
have enough lumber to build the beds to the contours of the slope. So we propped
the beds up with stones to make it level or at least reasonably so and will
eventually fill around the bases with soil and mulch. We got our compost
delivered on day four so we got busy filling the beds and mulching around
them. We happened to have a few trees cut down last year... they were too close to
the house and our driveway had been destroyed by the roots. So we had the
trees removed and put in a new driveway and now we've got this everlasting mulch
pile in the backyard that we use in areas like this or on our paths back in
the wooded area of our backyard. So far we've planted several types of
lettuce, some sugar snap peas, and a few herbs: cilantro, basil, and dill. In North
Carolina the last frost date is April 15th. Lettuces and peas are fine in cold
weather. The herbs are pretty frost sensitive but I always plant a few seeds
early. They're pretty cheap and if we don't get a late frost I can start
harvesting a couple weeks earlier than I expected to