Tessa's plant list was written on the back of an appointment card from her office: four tomatoes, four peppers, bush beans, and "lots of basil," underlined twice. It sat on the fridge for most of May while we finished other projects. Last week it finally turned into two cedar raised beds on the south side of the garage.
Officially they're her birthday present. She turned 29 on Monday. Unofficially, I think she would have built them herself if I'd waited one more weekend.
Where and why cedar
The south side of our detached garage gets sun from mid-morning until late afternoon, which is the best light in the backyard. The silver maple in the back corner shades most of the rest of the yard by July, so there wasn't much debate about location.
The bigger debate was wood. Pressure-treated lumber would have been noticeably cheaper. We went with cedar because it's growing food, because cedar holds up well outdoors without treatment, and because Tessa had read enough to want nothing to do with treated wood in a vegetable bed. Cedar was the largest line on the receipt, and I'd make the same choice again.
The materials list for two 4-by-8 beds:
- Twelve cedar 2x8 boards, 8 feet long (two courses high per bed, with one board cut in half for the ends of each course)
- One cedar 4x4, cut into corner posts
- A box of exterior screws
That came to $312 for lumber and hardware. Gary lent me his miter saw, which made every cut square on the first try, something my handsaw-and-a-prayer method would not have done. We don't own a saw like that, and for a one-weekend project there was no reason to.
Building them
I built the frames on Sunday, June 1, the day after we pulled the upstairs carpet, which was not my most rested weekend. Each bed is two courses of 2x8 screwed into 4x4 posts at the inside corners, about 14 and a half inches tall. I predrilled every screw hole with the drill and drove the screws with the impact so the cedar wouldn't split near the ends.
The ground along the garage slopes slightly, so I dug the high side down instead of shimming the low side up, checking with a four-foot level as I went. Then we laid cardboard boxes in the bottom of each bed to smother the grass.
The soil came on Friday, my work-from-home day: about three cubic yards of garden blend, delivered into the driveway for $180. Our driveway is about 70 feet long, so that was a lot of wheelbarrow trips from the street end to the backyard. Tessa raked while I hauled. We filled both beds by dinner and planted that evening while it was still light.
The mistake and the fence
I spaced the beds 18 inches apart because it looked right in the yard. Our EGO mower deck is 21 inches. You can see where this is going. The strip of lawn between the two beds can't be mowed, so we've decided it isn't lawn anymore. It's getting more cardboard and a layer of wood chips. If I did it again, I'd measure the mower before measuring anything else, or I'd leave a full three feet so we could kneel in there comfortably.
Moose was very interested in the soil pile in the driveway and even more interested once it was in the beds at a nice digging height. Gary had a roll of two-foot garden fence in his garage that he hasn't used since the nineties, so a few stakes and that fence now ring both beds. It's not a serious barrier for a 70-pound dog. It's more of a suggestion, and so far he's taking it.
The planting:
- Tomatoes: two Early Girls and two Sungolds
- Peppers: two bell, two jalapeño
- Bush beans in two rows
- Basil everywhere there was a gap
Total for both beds: $492, which is $312 in lumber and $180 in soil. The hose reaches from the back spigot if I drag it around the garage corner, and I've already learned to look before I swing it so I don't take out a pepper plant.
This morning the basil somehow already looked taller, Tessa checked the beds twice before breakfast with her coffee, and Moose has accepted the fence, mostly.
