Raised Beds Completed

With the fine weather and a bit of spare money in my pocket the last five raised beds were built and installed Saturday.

The day started with an early trip down to Wickes DIY store to collect 30 lengths of Gravel Board, each board is 1.83m long, and luckily I had the help of a friend of mine, who although doesn’t own a huge car, it’s certainly bigger than ours when the seats are folded down.

Well with the wood dropped off at the plot I went home to gather the tools for the day, which include my high quality B&Q value Saw and a collection of nails and hammers.

Back up the plot the work commenced and I now have blisters on my hands from sawing down 4 boards to 1.2m, and sawing the posts for ten beds, four per bed, and then sawing the off cuts into smaller pieces to join the sides together.

With much sawing and hammering I now have the eight raised beds I wanted, four 1.2m x 3.6m and four 1.8m x 3.6m, now though the joy of digging them over and getting some compostmanure into them will begin.

Find of the day, amongst the scrap metals and bits of rock and glass was this very rusty old Hoe end, who knows what else I may find.

Building Compost Bins

Well this weekend I managed to get some wood from the local Freecycle to build a compost bin or two.

Luckily when I picked it up the majority of the wood was old floorboards with a few pieces of ply thrown in for good measure.

So after a bit of sawing using one of my raised beds as a work surface and standing on a piece of the ply, it was very boggy which was annoying as it was rock hard and frosty when I dropped the wood off in the morning, I managed to build the two 1 Cubic Metre bins you can see in the photos.

I do still need to build a front and get a piece or two for the lid, but they are in essence complete. To kick off the composting I will be moving the contents of the current garden bin over to the alltoment and filling as much of one up and then add to it, whilst I think collecting leaves and twigs to mulch down in the other side.

As for producing useful compost, that remains to be seen.