New veg garden - plans, hints, tips

scarepanda

So, I'm about to build a new veg garden. I've built 2 veg gardens before, but they were at a rented house so everything was done on the cheap because of that. The new veg garden is at our own house, so it will be built with it being a permanent garden in mind.

My last veg garden I was very happy with, so I'm planning on sticking with that basic idea. I'd love any hints/tips/advice on anything you wish you had done differently in your garden.

I'll stick up a photo/sketch in a little while of the area/planned layout, but my basic plan is to use 9*2 16' lengths of treated timber, 2 high to create an 18" Raised bed. I'll stick 2 16' lengths together to create 4 adjoining 8'x4' veg beds. I'll have 2 of these parallel, so 8 beds in total. To get started, I'll build all the frames but only fill and grow in one set of the beds this spring. I'll slowly fill the other set during the summer for use next year.

My plan is to fill 1/3 of the bed with garden waste - branches, grass cuttings etc. I'll then get soil and fill the bed up to 3/4inches from the top and finally a couple of inches of peat free garden compost. I'm not sure if this is necessary, but personally I like the look of it and find it a bit easier to sow seeds direct.

So, I've a few initial questions:
1) would anyone bother lining the inside of the beds with dpc or something similar?
2) with regards the soil, would you invest in 'proper' soil from a garden supplier? Or just get top soil locally? This is what I've done before and the soil has been decent quality. However when the guy would have it on hand all depends on what work he's at at that particular time.

I'd highly recommend following Charles Dowding's no dig principle.

https://charlesdowding.co.uk/

He has great books and a fantastic youtube channel.

My main tip would be start small!

Barnaboy

Sounds great to me. One top from me is to ensure that there is a decent gap between the beds for planting, weeding etc. Its extraordinary how they shrink when plants are in full growth. Go for at least three feet if you have the space.

And the other thing is location. Obviously the sunnier the better, but you also have to factor in other uses of the garden. Would your partner/kids like an area to sit or play in the summer sun?

scarepanda

I love Charles Dowdings channel! I'll be no dig once I get the beds built. I have two main reasons for going the raised bed route -1) I find them easier to maintain and 2) in this house, while the garden itself doesn't seem to flood, the water table is quite high and the fields behind and to one side of us flood relatively quick during the kind of weather we have been having lately. So I want to avoid any drainage issues with the beds themselvesthemselves especially early in the season.

I've factored in 3.5' walkways, which I will put down a weed membrane and cover with gravel from another part of the garden. I made that mistake in the first garden I ever put together and couldn't get a wheelbarrow down through it once stuff started to grow!

As for location, we have a large back garden (roughly 1000m2 of lawn). I'm semi limited to the general location of the veg garden as I want to avoid the percolation area for the septic tank which goes out as far as the middle of the lawn from the opposite side of the garden. However where I am putting the Veg beds is the most natural spot in the garden (I think) in terms of sunlight and being out of the way of the kids. The veg beds will be under the east boundary hedge, so will get sunlight from mid morning or so onwards. I'll throw up a sketch in a while, hopefully that will explain it a bit better!

looksee

Lining the insides of the beds - only the sides, not the bottom. If you put in branches be prepared for the level of the bed to drop significantly over a season or two - it will drop anyway, but branches create a lot of air space initially.

CelticRambler

If you are going to line the beds, make sure you use a really (really) heavy-duty product. Where I've lined beds like this (with plastic) I've found that roots and tools and splinters and stones and birds and rodents rapidly make holes in it, and from that point thinner plastic disintegrates very quickly. After various less-than-satisfactory experiences, I don't line the major structure any more - the small amount of rotted wood on the inside is far preferable to years of picking bits of plastic out of the soil.

And a "+1" to looksee's comment regarding the drop in levels if you use branches. If possible, shred them first. I've had some piles of mixed prunings drop in height/volume by 75% over a few years, which makes perfect sense when I see how small a volume of chips I end up with after shredding a massive pile of woodland clearance. Obviously this depends on the size of your branch, though!

Igotadose

With regard to no dig and raised beds, Dowding doesn't like raised beds, told me in the commentary on one of his videos that disturbing soil and raising beds attracted slugs. If you're in a damp environment (I am, marine climate west Kerry), slugs are a constant problem. Having tried a number of things in raised- and no-dig beds, here's what I found works and what doesn't

Works:
Keeping the beds clean of weeds and fallen leaves. The cleaner the bed, the fewer the slugs. Some sort of mulch helps, I eventually settled on grass from mowing the nearby lawns as it was available and kept weeds down too.

Slug traps baited with yeast/sugar/water mix. Basically, think peanut-butter jars with holes cut in them filled halfway with a mix of 1 yeast packet/1 tablespoon sugar/1 tablespoon flour in 2 liters of water. Works as well as beer, and is cheaper, but you have to deal with emptying and refilling the traps regularly.

Lockdowns insofar as I could pay a lot more attention the garden, and go on 'slug safari' at night with a torch. Got a lot of slugs this way as well as snails.

After a couple months of active slug control I could definitely see improvement in the vegetables. Harder to do in the summer as dusk came later, but it still worked well enough.

Didn't work:
Slug pellets. Only tried the organic ones, guess what, the material is grain, the crows ate it. I've heard the toxic stuff works but I didn't try it around my vegetables.

Nema-slug. I think my environment just gets too wet. My neighbor, a much better gardener than me, tried it on a couple of occasions with no luck, he said the product is very fussy about temperature and humidity and it didn't work for him. There's a few videos about making your own by basically catching diseased slugs and grinding them up with water and pouring on the beds. I think I'd end up divorced should herself see *that* in action.

Trying next:

I'm putting in a new bed, no-dig, in my side yard which is full of weeds, never had lawn. I am planning on a bed with a border of about a meter around it of durable plastic they use on the paths at one of the garden centers, it's woven weed block. Slugs were very aggressive in other no dig beds this year in this area until I settled on the slug traps (A lot of them btw, like one every 2 sq. meters or so). When I lived in the USA, one organic farmer there told me he kept slugs down (Pacific Northwest, 6 inch long slugs common, though not the 1 foot long yellow ones that I saw in CA), was to keep a border of bare sand/soil where he didn't allow anything to grow. The slugs wouldn't crawl across it.

Also, for the first time since we lived here, we had hedgehogs in the yard. Supposedly they eat slugs. Might put in a hedgehog house for them in the Spring, though I'd rather not disturb them plus there are so many feral cats around.

I went no dig with cardboard and woodchips which kept weeds down. End of my first year so next year should be easier

Read the same comments from CD about raised beds.

magicbastarder

CelticRambler wrote: »

If you are going to line the beds, make sure you use a really (really) heavy-duty product.

i am planning on building raised beds and was thinking of using damp proof course for this purpose; it's reasonably cheap and can be obtained in a range of widths:

https://www.screwfix.ie/c/building-flooring/damp-proof-courses/cat850234

Igotadose

magicbastarder wrote: »

i am planning on building raised beds and was thinking of using damp proof course for this purpose; it's reasonably cheap and can be obtained in a range of widths:

https://www.screwfix.ie/c/building-flooring/damp-proof-courses/cat850234

Not commenting on the product, but can you get anything out of screwfix in a timely way anymore? My last order took a month. Others are reporting similar. I think they're shipping everything out of the UK - there's a border in place tomorrow.

magicbastarder

i'd say any builder's providers would have some. maybe not in the specific size possibly, but it's fairly standard product.
i only used the screwfix link as it was the first return on a google search.

CelticRambler

magicbastarder wrote: »

i am planning on building raised beds and was thinking of using damp proof course for this purpose

I broke down the last of my raised beds (making them sunken for the future) last Spring. Those ones were made with boards scavenged from a shed ceiling/attic floor, and have been out in all weather for about ten years. They were sufficiently undamaged for me to be able to re-purpose a few of them into the base for a Christmas table decoration with minimal planing and trimming. :cool:

jelem

2020 purchased seeds from lidl - tomatoes\cucumbers\green beans and peas.
tomatoes and cucumbers seed in pot at side of house (no tunnels or greenhouse).
the rest seed straight into ground.
south facing wall tomatoes and cucumbers and west facing wall peas and green beans.
Soil well dug and yearly couple bags manure with top coat of any bags compost "woodies"
and from home made compost pile of and include even weeds fired in during year previous.
netting only no glass or poly.
higher yield on all than expected, even after pricking out as seeds 99% sprouted which was
a surprise and later found still overcrowded peas and beans.
3 cucumber plants was more than enough for glut and pass excess to relatives.
last tomatoes picked "still green" middle november and ripened in airing cupboard.
so last eaten early december and no going mould in 2 weeks.
*******
So not belittling but cheap lidl seeds and cheap bags compost with home made compost
No chemicals or glass\poly tunnels and will go again 2021
for those new to grow your own the flavours are hard to beat by shop bought .
dig and weed is the only hard part but well worth it

scarepanda

Hello!

Firstly, happy new year everyone! Sorry I haven't been responding the last few days.

Secondly, I've attached a very rough sketch of the general layout of the garden and where the veg garden will be going.

Thirdly, thank you for the advice. With regard to Charles dowding, I knew he was no dig due to soil structure, but stupidly i didn't realise he wasn't for raised beds for that reason, it does make sense though. I will however be sticking with the raised beds. I find them far easier to maintain and harder for the kids and dogs to walk all over! It might be a silly reason, but I also find them visually nicer, which is important as the veg garden will be fairly centered in the garden so I want it to be a bit of a feature, if that makes sense?

The main part of the garden is over the percolation area and is larger than it looks in my lovely sketch, so that's where the kids/dogs/general living will be.

As for the level of the beds falling over time, I've taken that into consideration. We took down a load of shrubs last September and I'll be using them as some of the filling along with grass cuttings. I do need to chop them up a bit more though. And over the next few years ill top up the level in spring. My main aim this year is to get 4 usable beds. The other 4 beds will be filled more gradually and the neighbours will be bringing their grass cuttings over. We have a robot mower so no grass cuttings unfortunately.

As for lining the beds, I'm still undecided. It would just be the sides, and I'd be getting decent dpc from the local hardware store. With 2inch treated timber I'm not sure how much benefit it would be though.

For anyone that has built raised beds, what did you do for the main soil filling? Get regular top soil from someone local or spend the extra money for the 'proper' screened stuff?

CelticRambler

Is that sketch reasonably to scale? If so, I'd be a bit worried about the proximity of the whitethorn hedge, and wouldn't be mad about having a silver birch growing up the middle of one of the pathways. What fruit are you planning to grow in the bed alongside the hedge?

Not sure my situation would be comparable to yours, but I filled my raised with all kinds of organic material available on-site - kitchen waste (the whole lot - meat, bones, citrus, everything!); grass clippings; chicken poop, cat poop; rotten wood, not rotten wood; cardboard; clumps of weeds raked out of another bed ...

In effect, each raised bed was a compost heap until it was ready to be brought into service, by which time the level in another one had sunk low enough to take on the role. But I abandoned that system last year (circumstances make it more sensible for me to move to terraced and sunken beds)

scarepanda

No, its just a rough layout of where the veg garden will be going.

What would you be most concerned about with the hedge? Shade? Or something else? It's currently about 2/2.5m high. How far away from the hedge would you put the veg garden?

I'm not 100% sure what exactly I'd be putting in the fruit bed, but thinking a couple of apple trees, and soft fruit. I'm half thinking of trying to train fruit trees. But it's not a project for this year so I haven't given it a massive amount of thought tbh. I'd be thinking of allowing about 6ft for that bed. But I have to clear out the bottom of the hedge to allow me to secure it for the dogs, so I don't quite know what I'm dealing with till I get that done. That will be done before the raised beds go in.

I agree about the tree, not ideal. But it's one of the only trees I'm leaving in the garden, so for the moment I'm going to work around it. I have a bit of space to play with across the width of the garden, so I can make the path wider to allow for it. I won't fully know exactly what it will impact till I get the hedge cleared out and mark it out. And I'll just have to deal with any shade from it, although looking at it last summer I don't think it will be too bad - hopefully!

Did you not find that rats were attracted to the meat and bones? Aside from that i would be hoping the bottom layer to be pretty much the same make up as yours. Currently the shrubs are the main material I have, and the neighbours grass cuttings later in the year.

CelticRambler

scarepanda wrote: »

What would you be most concerned about with the hedge? Shade? Or something else? It's currently about 2/2.5m high. How far away from the hedge would you put the veg garden?

I'm not 100% sure what exactly I'd be putting in the fruit bed, but thinking a couple of apple trees, and soft fruit. I'm half thinking of trying to train fruit trees. But it's not a project for this year so I haven't given it a massive amount of thought tbh. I'd be thinking of allowing about 6ft for that bed.

Whitethorn/hawthorn is (the clue is in the name!) thorny! And those thorns (bits of twig) will fall into the fruit bed planted underneath making it a risky business to pick anything at ground level. In addition, it's a very vigorous tree - you're going to need to be able to get in to it to prune it, either regularly, bit by bit, or ever few years to do a proper hatchet job. For that, you're going to need space.

Also, the root system of such a hedge can also be quite extensive and the one thing fruit needs more than anything else is water. I'd be concerned that you're deliberately creating a high-maintenance bed (especially in terms of irrigation) that will never be particularly productive. I have free-standing hawthorn in several in-garden hedgrows, and I give them 3m worth of space for themselves and the under-planted area (bulbs/wildflowers/foliage plants) and a 1.5m walkway/access path ... and take the loping shears to them once a year.

If you're thinking about espalier forms or the like for tree-fruit, I'd put those 2m away from the hedge and use them as the backdrop to a narrower fruit bed.

scarepanda wrote: »

I agree about the tree, not ideal. But it's one of the only trees I'm leaving in the garden, so for the moment I'm going to work around it. I have a bit of space to play with across the width of the garden, so I can make the path wider to allow for it. I won't fully know exactly what it will impact till I get the hedge cleared out and mark it out. And I'll just have to deal with any shade from it, although looking at it last summer I don't think it will be too bad - hopefully!

If you want to keep the tree, would you consider building a circular bed around it? You could use that for fast-growing and/or short season crops. You'll face the same problem as with the hedge in that the tree will want a lot of water for itself, but it'll probably be drinking from deep down, so you should be able to successfully grow salads and some herbs without having to worry about the competition. Shade in the height of summer might be handy to slow down bolting of lettuces.

scarepanda wrote: »

Did you not find that rats were attracted to the meat and bones?

Never went looking for them, so I couldn't tell you! But sure they're already in the house (along with mice, dormice, crickets, lizards, an owl, an occasional toad ... ) so I'd rather they were eating in the compost heap than taking stuff out of the bin! :pac:

Bill Hook

I have a nodig garden here (not raised beds) that I made from about 100m square of lawn in 2019. We covered the area with grass cuttings from strimming a field topped with a load of farmyard manure spread over the entire area and finished it off with a layer of mushroom compost. We didn't bother with topsoil and everything grew like mad. Really pleased with the beds, the ease of planting, weeding etc. Plan is to top dress each year with garden compost and use green manures to maintain fertility.

But we have had major slug problems so far, although it settled down a bit during the dry spell last April. I was (reluctantly) using Sluggo but had to stop because the roof tiles, stones, etc I was putting the pellets under were being upturned by something (not slugs alas) and the pellets eaten. An expensive waste of time. Now I put wheat germ under the tiles/stones/whatever and patrol the garden regularly with a pair of scissors: full Psycho mode.

I have a serious rat problem at the moment which I am blaming on the Hugelkultur bed that I made last year. It sounds a bit similar to your idea for raised beds (a pile of branches, grass, leaves, compost, general garden detritus covered in sod/soil) and I think it is basically a rat hotel. I have 2 cats but despite their best efforts my stored potatoes are under siege. Today's task is to try and vermin proof a storage area!

For an Irish take on nodig you could have a look at http://gardensforlife.ie/

looksee

We have a couple of variations on the raised bed/Hugelkulture/compost heap situation, but one thing I absolutely do not do is put kitchen scraps on them. I have no doubt there are rats all around, but we have not had any problems with them.

Hocus Focus

CelticRambler wrote: »

Is that sketch reasonably to scale? If so, I'd be a bit worried about the proximity of the whitethorn hedge, and wouldn't be mad about having a silver birch growing up the middle of one of the pathways. What fruit are you planning to grow in the bed alongside the hedge?

Not sure my situation would be comparable to yours, but I filled my raised with all kinds of organic material available on-site - kitchen waste (the whole lot - meat, bones, citrus, everything!); grass clippings; chicken poop, cat poop; rotten wood, not rotten wood; cardboard; clumps of weeds raked out of another bed ...

In effect, each raised bed was a compost heap until it was ready to be brought into service, by which time the level in another one had sunk low enough to take on the role. But I abandoned that system last year (circumstances make it more sensible for me to move to terraced and sunken beds)

1.Have you not had a rat problem due to using cooked food waste?
2. Be careful that the wood you have buried in the beds is not treated timber as the chemicals could leach into the veg you are growing.
3.Citrus repels worms and other organisms so the breakdown of the other materials will be slowed down.

Hocus Focus

Igotadose wrote: »

With regard to no dig and raised beds, Dowding doesn't like raised beds, told me in the commentary on one of his videos that disturbing soil and raising beds attracted slugs. If you're in a damp environment (I am, marine climate west Kerry), slugs are a constant problem. Having tried a number of things in raised- and no-dig beds, here's what I found works and what doesn't

Works:
Keeping the beds clean of weeds and fallen leaves. The cleaner the bed, the fewer the slugs. Some sort of mulch helps, I eventually settled on grass from mowing the nearby lawns as it was available and kept weeds down too.

Slug traps baited with yeast/sugar/water mix. Basically, think peanut-butter jars with holes cut in them filled halfway with a mix of 1 yeast packet/1 tablespoon sugar/1 tablespoon flour in 2 liters of water. Works as well as beer, and is cheaper, but you have to deal with emptying and refilling the traps regularly.

Lockdowns insofar as I could pay a lot more attention the garden, and go on 'slug safari' at night with a torch. Got a lot of slugs this way as well as snails.

After a couple months of active slug control I could definitely see improvement in the vegetables. Harder to do in the summer as dusk came later, but it still worked well enough.

Didn't work:
Slug pellets. Only tried the organic ones, guess what, the material is grain, the crows ate it. I've heard the toxic stuff works but I didn't try it around my vegetables.

Nema-slug. I think my environment just gets too wet. My neighbor, a much better gardener than me, tried it on a couple of occasions with no luck, he said the product is very fussy about temperature and humidity and it didn't work for him. There's a few videos about making your own by basically catching diseased slugs and grinding them up with water and pouring on the beds. I think I'd end up divorced should herself see *that* in action.

Trying next:

I'm putting in a new bed, no-dig, in my side yard which is full of weeds, never had lawn. I am planning on a bed with a border of about a meter around it of durable plastic they use on the paths at one of the garden centers, it's woven weed block. Slugs were very aggressive in other no dig beds this year in this area until I settled on the slug traps (A lot of them btw, like one every 2 sq. meters or so). When I lived in the USA, one organic farmer there told me he kept slugs down (Pacific Northwest, 6 inch long slugs common, though not the 1 foot long yellow ones that I saw in CA), was to keep a border of bare sand/soil where he didn't allow anything to grow. The slugs wouldn't crawl across it.

Also, for the first time since we lived here, we had hedgehogs in the yard. Supposedly they eat slugs. Might put in a hedgehog house for them in the Spring, though I'd rather not disturb them plus there are so many feral cats around.

It's only very recently that Charles Dowding started disliking raised beds, probably due to the slugs. I think that they are a more efficient use of space. Just use more slug traps.
Hedgehogs will not live in a individual garden, as they range over a much wider territory.

CelticRambler

Hocus Focus wrote: »

1.Have you not had a rat problem due to using cooked food waste?

The rats were here before the food waste (or the humans - house was empty for ten years before we bought it). *I* don't have a problem with rats - mine have lovely glossy coats, thanks to their healthy rural lifestyle :cool: and for the most part, they go about their business without causing me any bother. The same cannot be said for the humans that come and go ...

Besides, the amount of cooked food waste in this household is miniscule compared to uncooked food waste, most of which is peelings, pips and frost-damaged veg. If the rats waited around for me to cook them a dinner, they'd die of starvation! :pac:

Hocus Focus wrote: »

2. Be careful that the wood you have buried in the beds is not treated timber as the chemicals could leach into the veg you are growing.

Way ahead of you ...

Hocus Focus wrote: »

3.Citrus repels worms and other organisms so the breakdown of the other materials will be slowed down.

It's all a question of proportion and habituation, as well as keeping things local and seasonal. Until I'm growing my own citrus on-site, the amount of oranges and lemons finding their way into the compost heap is tiny, and of the material ending up there, most of its citrussiness has been removed - why would I be buying them if I didn't want to use every last bit?

So the rule in this house is that all organic waste goes in the compost heap; no exceptions.

Bill Hook

CelticRambler wrote: »

*I* don't have a problem with rats - mine have lovely glossy coats, thanks to their healthy rural lifestyle :cool: and for the most part, they go about their business without causing me any bother.

I agree about the rats and I am trying to feel the love but it would be good if the feckers ate a whole crate of potatoes instead of nibbling a few in every bloody crate.

MacDanger

scarepanda wrote: »

I'll stick up a photo/sketch in a little while of the area/planned layout, but my basic plan is to use 9*2 16' lengths of treated timber, 2 high to create an 18" Raised bed. I'll stick 2 16' lengths together to create 4 adjoining 8'x4' veg beds. I'll have 2 of these parallel, so 8 beds in total. To get started, I'll build all the frames but only fill and grow in one set of the beds this spring. I'll slowly fill the other set during the summer for use next year.

Is it okay to use treated timber as part of a vegetable patch?

CelticRambler

It very much depends on what it's treated with and how you're planning to use it. Solid planks treated with a modern preservative and used solely for the structural elements should be reasonably ok.

Hocus Focus

CelticRambler wrote: »

It very much depends on what it's treated with and how you're planning to use it. Solid planks treated with a modern preservative and used solely for the structural elements should be reasonably ok.

Traditional railway sleepers will last a very long time but they are full of creosote, a carcinogen, and so they are not suitable in the context of growing food plants. Scaffold boards would be the next most favoured type of timber They are completely free of any preservatives so they don't last very long, hence the move nowadays towards the use of vacuum infused treated timber. As mentioned above, heavy polythene Damp Proof Course (DPC) material is the most practical one for lining the sides so as to prevent the chemicals leaching into the compost. Weed membrane is no use for this. No need to line the bottom.

CelticRambler

Hocus Focus wrote: »

As mentioned above, heavy polythene Damp Proof Course (DPC) material is the most practical one for lining the sides so as to prevent the chemicals leaching into the compost.

Swings and roundabouts: polythene can, itself, leach endocrine-like substances into the soil. As with everything else, the longer it's there, the more likely it is to have an effect.

The other way of looking at it, of course, is that the amount of any of these things that end up in your veg (and eventually in your blood stream) is minuscule compared to what you're breathing in every time you go to do your week's shopping.