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  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] Garden beds
  • Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 09:56:24 -0700

And not that I wouldn't like waist high stone lined beds. That would be a
lot of fun to garden.

Building stone beds consumes a huge amount of time. I spent about a year of intermittent work on the Christina Garden. It is so time- consuming that I could not sustain constant work on it for all the other opportunities crying for attention. A stone walls also takes up a lot of room and unless it is backed by reinforced concrete is subject to breaking from frost, hydrostatic pressure or being thumped by a runaway tractor. All that said, the reward is its beauty and permanence.

I will build most future garden beds of ferrocement. The greatest challenge is tying the poultry mesh together so I am designing in my mind ways to do it more easily. Ferrocement garden bed walls are superior to stone because they are much thinner, much stronger and go up much faster. Ferrocement is very strong and can easily be tied across the width of the bed, making it nigh impossible for walls to ever lean. Actually, I want mine to purposely lean outward, the better to get my toes against them and thus be able to more easily reach across. Another design advantage to ferrocement is the ease of adding sockets or braces to support various trellis or mini-hoophouse structures.

It needs to be said that there is a disadvantage of raised beds. The higher the bed is built, the more irrigation is needed due to increased drainage. Thus, as walls rise in height, it becomes ever more imperative to build and maintain soil of high organic content.





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