Potting Shed News - DIY Raised Beds

These were some raided beds we built on my allotment several years ago. The soil there was clay and I found it too depressing to work as it was like concrete in Summer and flooded in Winter, so I decided on raised beds. While it's possible to buy some lovely ready made ones or buy in fashionable railway sleepers for the job, our funds didn't stretch enough to that for the amount we needed. I think even if they had, I would have preferred to spend that money on plants or other garden supplies!

In the end we came upon a chap selling old cabbage crates. They measure 1 x 1 x 1 metre and he had an abundance of them available. (They are brought in containing imported cabbage or other veg and because its too expensive to send them back empty, they are then just broken up and disposed of!!) This chap, like me, thought this was an awful waste, so he had brought them and was selling them on for around £7 each. (As I say, that was a few years ago, but I have seen them for sale on the side of the road since for not much more)

For best value, just cut them in two and you've got a raised bed half a metre high, two long and one wide, which is a great growing space as (even if you're short like me!) you can always reach the middle. You can see that the ones photographed here were set up slightly differently. My allotment happened to be in the middle of a very exposed patch of Fenland, so for the beds along the side battered by the prevailing wind we left one side of the crate intact to provide half a metre of protection. As it turned out, it was also great for suspending protection netting from.

The crates were screwed together in a row for stability, lined with empty compost bags with a staple-gun and filled with soil. You don't have to use compost bags of course, you just need to get the crates lined with something to stop the soil falling through the gaps. Me being me I preferred to recycle an old bag rather than buying in plastic for the purpose. We also gave the beds a coat of wood preserver while we could get at all the areas that would eventually be covered up.

Whilst you can buy the soil in bulk to fill the raised beds, there are usually recycling plants offering it for free or for a small price as long as you come and take it away. We happened to know a local wholesale grower who was more than happy to let us turn up with our wheelbarrow and take as much of their waste soil as we could.

Advice: do be careful about the soil you fill your beds with. While free soil is always good, you want to make sure it hasn't got anything in it that will cause you trouble later on - i. e pests and diseases. Generally speaking, soil from a recycling plant will have been heat treated to prevent this, but it's always worth asking where it's come from and what has been done to prevent things spreading! The soil we obtained had been used for propagation of alpines, so although weed free it did occasionally contain a stray Sedum which we were more than happy to accommodate! 

If using second-hand soil to bulk up the bed I would still recommend buying a few bags of good quality compost for the top six inches or so if you can afford it (or if you haven't managed to make that much compost from your own garden waste yet! )

If you can't find cabbage crates, you could (with a little DIY skill) knock up something similar with pallets, with are probably easier to obtain now there are so many ideas out there for how to use them! 

One of the crates we cut up into three shallow beds for taller crops. They were treated in the same way, with liner and wood preserver. Some of the slats we upended and used as a loose frame to suspend netting from. 

Whilst this seems a lot of work, especially if you're barrowing free soil into the beds (honestly, it feels like they're bottomless after a while!) these beds should, with a little care, ultimately be hassle free. They are easy to weed and because the soil hasn't been trodden down over the years, they are heavenly to dig! Crop rotation will help get nutrients in the soil and if you have some of them empty over winter you can also sow a small green manure crop to dig in before the start of the next season.