Last weekend had perfect weather, so we decided to go ahead and create our raised bed. This was great fun and took less time than I thought. It took about four hours, including a couple trips to the Dutch Plant Farm and one trip to Home Depot.
On Saturday evening, I cleared the 2.5' x 13' area I had chosen for the bed. First, my daughter and I staked out the area we planned to use. She had fun planting the stakes. We chose an area up against our back fence.
Second, I used my spade to create the borders of the area. Then, I used a combination of my trowel and shovel to clear off the grassy surface so that only soil was left. Most books and web site I consulted suggested only clearing off the top 1 or 2 inches. That makes sense for most people, as you want to retain as much soil as possible.However, my yard is filled with crab grass, so I had to remove more of the surface just to get most of it out of the bed area. When creating a bed, its very important to remove all weeds (crab grass is definitely a weed in this context). Once I had removed most of the surface, I removed a few remaining crab grass roots and then, with my daughter's help, smoothed out the remaining soil with her tiny trowel, my trowel, and my steel rake. She had a blast and it was a lot of fun for me, too.
With the area cleared and the sun setting, we called it a night and got excited for our work the next morning.
In the morning, we went to Dutch Plant farm and bought fast-acting hydrated lime to bring up the PH level of the soil in our bed. I followed the instructions and, after using my digging fork to aerate the cleared bed, added enough to raise the PH level 1 point, as suggested by the results of the soil sample analysis I had done a few weeks ago.We also bought 15 bags of topsoil (1 cubic foot / bag) and 6 bags of leafgro (1.5 cubic feet / bag). This was slightly too much for my 32.5 square foot area, so I returned 5 bags of topsoil and 1 bag of leafgro. In any case, after placing a 20' fiber edge around the bed to prevent grass and weeds from growing into the garden, I put the leafgro (organic compost made from leaves) on top of the cleared bed, then the topsoil on top of that. My daughter and I then sculpted the edges of the soil with our trowels and shovel so that the sides would gently slope down to the edges of the bed. We then wet it all down for good measure.
Finally, I went back to the Dutch Plant Farm and got 5 bags of pine bark mini-nuggets mulch, which I put over everything else. It is important to avoid leaving any soil exposed, b/c any seeds that fly off a lawn and land on the new bed will result in weeds in the garden later.Now, we just need to wait a couple weeks to plant. A friendly co-worker told me today that she's going to give me some extra strawberry plants that she has -- my daughter will love that!
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