Thinking Ahead - New Raised Beds For Springtime

I know - we've only just finished having summery weather and starting to get autumnal chills and damp coming on. But we're already starting to plan for what we're going to do in the garden next year.

This weekend's job was to assemble and prepare some new raised beds. I know it's possible to make them out of recycled things, but for me time is one of the biggest pressures. Trying to dismantle old pallets was hugely time consuming, through a combination of not having the right tools and not really knowing the best angles to attack them from.

We bought a single raised bed last year, and it worked really, really well. It even went some way towards defeating the slugs and snails our garden is infested with. Just the one raised bed gave us enough tomatoes that we didn't need to buy any for two months. We've still got quite a lot of tomato paste in the freezer, ready to be turned into chilli sauce and curry.

So we ordered two more. Unfortunately, I put them on the patio when they were delivered, and we had a week of solid heavy rain.

That meant that when I discovered they'd sent us the wrong colour, it was impossible to send them back.

I thought they'd be this nice eggshell colour to match the existing one. But no, that was the inside protective colour.

I even screwed some of the pieces together before realising. What a numpty !

So I took it all apart and started again.

This is the two ends and the straight sections. They're just lightly tacked together at this stage.

Assembling the whole thing on the patio and joining the parts loosely at first meant that I could give it a shake and ensure it was straight and level before tightening it all up.

It comes with a protective strip for the top edge. It needs this, the edge is pretty sharp without it !

The strip pushes down over the top, and then the end is cut to length with a Stanley knife. Pushing it down at the joins is a tricky business, it's a case of opening the bottom edge up enough to slide over both thicknesses of metal without lopping the end of a finger off in the process.

This is the raised beds in position. Tomorrow's job is to get some gravel for them to sit on, which provides drainage and protects the bottom edges from sitting on earth and rusting. Then later on in the week, we've got a delivery of compost coming. We're having to buy it this year as we haven't got enough space in the garden for a compost bin, but I'm hoping to do something about that at some point.

The plan is to fill these with onions, tomatoes and maybe potatoes or something else we get through a lot of, and over a period of a few years see how close we can get to being self-sufficient in a few key foodstuffs. Plus it always tastes nicer when it's fresh out of the garden !