Friday 3 April 2009

Post 16: The (homegrown) Good Life is out there somewhere....







Now then my little charmers; in an effort to reduce food miles from grown on just the other side of town, I'm going to have a go for growing on just the other side of the garden. For this I need some raised beds - you can't be expecting a man of my advancing years to bend right over.


So, top left, here's the 3 raised beds I've bought. It says two people are required to build these and I can see why - I had to caber toss them across the garden. Once unpacked the individual bits of wood have become rather more manageable. I say manageable; I was expecting something akin to an ikea flat pack with chunkier wood. Oh, no though; this stuff requires drilling. The wife is quaking in her boots at the thought of the damage I can do with a drill.


First though, my veg plot ground is not flat. This is going to involve some digging. and this has me quaking in my boots, and this requires manual labour and that's hard.
To date my planters have cost me £200, so I'm going to have to produce quite a bit of veg to get that back.

2 comments:

  1. Did you consider being even greener and using reclaimed wood? This Railway Sleepers website have a good selection of reclaimed timber that would have been ideal for raised beds. Keep posting!

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  2. I looked at these and they'd have looked nicer. But they'd have been more difficult to build. But it was mainly just the money. I wanted three fairly small beds, as I thought this would give me enough space but they'd also be easily manageable.

    To make similar beds from these, I'd have needed 18 sleepers with 18 cuts (I haven't got the tools or inclination to cut them myself). For the Oak 3 reclaimed, this would cost a touch over £600 - so it wasn't a tricky decision in the end.

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