Grow Your Own – Boxing Day (Part Deux)
by John Weckerle
In our last Grow Your Own article, we went through the basic construction of a box for raised bed gardening (again, with a nod to Mel Bartholemew’s The New Square Foot Gardening). After writing that article, we moved the bed into place, leveled it, and mixed some soil. This new bed contains approximately one large wheelbarrow (alas, the last) of the soil given to us by Roger Alink of Wildlife West Nature Park last year, one bag each of composted cotton burr and chicken compost, one 2 ft3 bale of sphagnum peat moss, the last of the harvest from our household/yard compost bin, and a dozen or so shovels full of sand. The result is a rich and friable soil that is similar to the mix in the other two beds. We then added the grid to the top, simply attaching three pieces of lath in each direction using sheetrock screws and providing a visual aid to help us fit our plants into their square-foot domains. With all that done, it was time to plant and create the new critter control system.
Learning our lesson last year, we planned for this bed to contain the “biggies” that overshadowed and/or crowded out some of the other plants last year. The bed holds tomatoes (2), cucumbers (4 in 2 positions), broccoli(4), eggplant (2), cabbage (1), zucchini (about 6 in 2 positions), and straighneck yellow squash (about 6 in 2 positions). Why the crowding on the squash and the cucumbers? Well, we like squash and cucumbers, and experience from last year indicates that we can get away with it. Our beds are twice as high as those in The New Square Foot Gardening, so perhaps that gives us more leeway.
With the plants in the ground, the next task was to find a way to keep the local wildlife from depriving us of the harvest. The Conestoga-type arrangements we used on the other beds have their advantages, but we found last year that the squash and cucumbers in particular grew beyond the edge of the bed and pushed the wire away from the bed, allowing squirrels to find their way in and eat some of the eggplant. This year, we wanted to find a way to keep the squirrels out and allow room for some sort of climbing capability for the tomatoes and cucumbers.
We began by driving a 4-foot piece of rebar into the inside of each corner, leaving about 28 inches above the BOTTOM of the bed. We then ran 28-inch rabbit fencing around the bed upside down, which resulted in most of the larger holes being at the bottom, and attached it with some large fencing staples. We then created a square frame of PVC just slightly larger than the bed itself. Slipping the ends of two additional 10-foot lengths of 1/2 inch PVC(diagonally) created a domelike frame for the top. We laid bird netting over this, leaving a little extra on the ground around each side, and slipped the square PVC frame over it. The netting was then attached to the square PVC frame using indoor/outdoor cable ties (“zip ties,” to some of us). There is not enough room between the PVC and the bed frame for anything bigger than a mouse to squeeze through, and our friendly neighborhood weasel, snakes, owls, and hawks seem to be doing a good job keeping those under control. This gives us full coverage over the entire bed, and the advantage of some height, which will allow us to use tomato cages and/or mini-trellises to allow plants to climb.
Additional plants were also added to the other beds. Our inventory now includes, in addition to the items mentioned above, tomatoes (5), mexi-bell peppers (2), green bell peppers (2), lettuce (13), kale (2), chard (1), string beans (1, but we’ll be adding more), cabbage (4) , plus basil, cilantro, sage, thyme, and oregano. We’ve already had our first harvest – kale, which was incorporated to a very tasty and interesting butternut squash, kale, and white bean stew – and the first tomatoes have already appeared on one each of the cherry and beefsteak tomato plants.