Construction And Piping And Soil And Rain

So, it's been a little bit since I posted the rough plans for the garden and started this, and a lot of stuff has occurred since then (including a whole lot of rain delay, which is something I can't control). So it seems easiest for me to do this post as a catchup post for all of the detail stuff.

When planning a raised bed garden, there's a whole lot of debate on what should be used to build the raised beds, but very little debate on the size of them -- most people don't advise going above 4 feet wide, because you want to be able to reach the raised bed from both sides. But what people don't tend to take into consideration is how much space you need between the beds.

So before I could even build the beds, I had to start out with laying out the rough spacing; I knew that my garden cart (a Gorilla cart) isn't very wide, but it still had to be able to turn the corners. I figured out that three feet between the beds should mean that even if I upgrade to a full wheelbarrow, I should be able to make it fit. But I wasn't going to trust that to intuition, so I did some measurements on the ground, and put down the rough framework, like this:

I then happily towed my little Gorilla cart around and made sure I could turn every corner. (I probably should've built the backs to height so I could see if it would navigate those corners even with taller beds, but it seemed like it had plenty of room.

Another thing to consider when building raised beds: do you want to use drip irrigation? I very much did, because it's a lot more water-use friendly and it means that if I go out of town for a weekend, I can have them on a timer rather than just praying that my plants would still be alive when I got home. I'm picky about my irrigation choices, though; I wanted to use soaker hose (which is porous) rather than a more rigid hose with holes punched in it or with drippers attached. While it would have been possible to do soaker hose by attaching a bunch of premade soaker hoses to garden hoses and to a timer, I wanted a more finished look to the garden than that, so I opted to run pipe.

Oh, what fun I let myself in for.

Happily, I don't live in an area of the country which is prone to full freezes, because I'm very sure that my pipe depth is not code-compliant (I only went about 6" down). In part, I made that choice because most of the pipe is actually underneath the raised beds themselves, and thus it's always going to be covered by garden soil. However, the areas that aren't are eventually going to get an extra layer of soil down on top of them (for multiple reasons -- they turn into muddy messes when it rains, for example) and then later will probably be heavily mulched or covered with rock, whichever we eventually decide on (and that's well in the future).

... but if you live in an area of the country where it does get hard freeze, make sure that if you're ever doing something like what I'm doing, you find out where your frost line is and dig down deep enough to run your pipes under the frost line. Either that, or blow all the water out of your pipes with a compressor before the cold weather comes. I'm really glad I didn't have to go that far down, but if we ever do get a hard freeze, I'll be wishing I had.

I spent a couple days digging out the trenches, having a war with rocks the size of potatoes that were buried under the compacted soil in the back yard, etc, and then the day we went to do the actual piping, it was raining... but I'd already ordered my garden soil, and thus we were committed to the work, rain or no rain.

For the record, doing PVC piping in the rain is an experience. The "red hot blue glue" PVC joint compound hates to be wet when it's, well, wet. And yet the stuff keeps the pipe watertight. Go figger. So imagine, if you will, my husband crouched down in the mud, trying desperately to join pipe under the shelter of a very small umbrella that I was holding. (And no, I really wasn't under the umbrella much, so I was getting drenched.)

However, rain or no rain, we got it piped. So here's a few quick shots:

The pipe was not snugged down into its trench in these shots, because I ran out in the rain to go snap a few pictures. These are a few of the shots that actually worked. (There were many that just didn't.)

But what you can see from these pics is that we ran the pipe from the source straight down the center of each raised bed. There's a ball valve on each end that controls the water for that half of the bed, so if I opt to turn off the water on half the bed, I can do that without having to remove a bunch of irrigation piping.

Anyhow, after getting it this far, and testing to make sure it was watertight (which it was), we ran inside. Not much else happened for a couple days because the back yard was a muddy nightmare, and trying to even refill the trenches was an unmitigated disaster.

Tuesday morning, bright and early and in the rain, my soil arrived; he was here at 8am on the dot. So we tossed down some plastic on the front lawn and indicated that he should dump the load there. We did not expect for the truck to get stuck in our lawn, however (which, in retrospect, perhaps we should have); he backed up a little further than I'd expected onto the lawn in the attempt to keep all the soil up out of the gutter, and his rear right tire sank halfway into our lawn. Oops.

The driver was quite apologetic about leaving a gigantic hole in the lawn from his tire (I wasn't at all worried about it, honestly; I haven't gotten around to doing anything to the front yard yet, so it wasn't like he was destroying any prize lawn there). I was equally apologetic about the fact that he had to call for another truck from the landscape company to come help pull him out of our lawn.

Eventually, though, the truck was extricated, 8 cubic yards of soil was delivered, and we were happy.

I should add at this point that eight cubic yards of soil is a pile that's about 4 and a half feet tall, by 20 feet wide, by at least 12-14 feet across the other way. In other words, it consumed half of my front lawn and spilled over into the neighbor's yard a little bit (oops).

We got it all tarped over so it wouldn't wash away in the rain (which, by the way, was pouring down the entire time that the landscape delivery guy was here) and retreated back inside again.

Today, after a couple more days of rain, the actual raised beds started to happen.

There were multiple steps left to do. While the footprint of the beds had been in place for quite a while, most of the beds weren't fully constructed as of yet, which meant that the rest of the bricks weren't anchored in place with rebar down their center, the wood wasn't in place, the trenches had gotten roughly filled in but needed a little more tamping down of the soil. (I did use a little of that handy garden soil to help me with filling in the trenches, though, which shows up like a black trail on the otherwise muddy soil.)

So, my husband and I worked as a team. We got one bed fully ready, laid in some ground cloth (not plastic, as that wouldn't drain, but a landscaping fabric), put cardboard on top of that, and he began the process of hauling over soil. Meanwhile, while he was hauling soil around the side of the house, I was doing the rest of the bed construction, pounding rebar, and then running over to shift soil farther back in the bed after each load he dumped.

That doesn't look like a whole lot of soil, but that's the contents of two very full garden carts, probably the equivalent of about 6 cubic feet of soil (rough guesses). 

As we both added more soil (because when he took a break, I went and got more), I kept mounding it higher, so that I could eventually add back in the center boards. We had a piece of cardboard helping protect where the boards would be.

I think it probably took thirteen or fourteen carts full of soil to fill up the back compartment, but eventually we were able to slide the boards back in place and then prepare to work on the front one.

That front section, being half the height, went a whole lot faster. This is a little under half full in this shot.

Eventually, though, it got filled up with rich, gorgeous garden soil, and I think it looks pretty darned good.

Of course, that was only one bed; we only moved a quarter of that soil off the front lawn today. The rest will have to happen after the next bout of rain, which is supposed to last for 2-3 days and we might get as much as two inches of rain this time.

So, one out of four ain't bad, at least. And it looks great. It'll be even better when it's full of veggies.

In the meantime, I will go back to admiring the quality of my new garden soil (which, when compared to the grassy, weed-filled, muddy trainwreck that comprises most of my back yard, looks amazing).