New Veggie Patch

Our youngest daughter has been on at me for a while now to do something with our veggie patch. Like most veggie patches, ours is in an inconvenient location that has no other use. The land slopes badly and it is in a spot that makes mowing difficult. The old patch was basically a sloping area that was set aside for vegetables, but not very practical.

My wife and I were at the hardware store and we saw some raised bed kits that were, basically, some bits of corrugated iron with corners and an edge to protect the user from sharp corrugated iron. The metal was all painted and they looked pretty good. My wife and I looked at the price tag (for a decent size they were > $200) and we looked at each other. I was thinking, “I could make something just like that with some of the scrap that we have on our property”, my lovely wife was probably thinking “Aw, crap … another project that will never get finished”.

Later that day, we dragged down two long pieces of roofing iron from the top paddock (about 3m long by 1m wide). We went to the tip shop and bought some 1m x 1m lengths of recycled corrugated iron and then the lot went into the feed shed for later.

I had some old framing studs sitting in the feed shed from previous projects, so I set to cutting the timber up into 1m lengths. The long pieces of iron were screwed to 5 x 1m lengths (to give the iron some stability) and the 1m pieces had 2 1m lengths of timber attached. These were then screwed together to make a box 3m x 1m x 1m.

Next I had to dig out the old veggie patch. Now these old veggie patches had been in continuous usage (more or less) for about 20 years and had had enormous amounts of compost, sheep poo, chicken poo, horse poo, etc. added to the soil throughout that period. I was very surprised to find that the soil was so very poor after only about 1 foot down. After that it was very poor sandy soil followed by clay. I dug all of the “soil” out so that the raised bed would be level. That meant that I had to dig down about 2’ at the high end, and about 4” at the shallow end. Next, we carried the raised bed over and plonked it into the hole.

We filled the bottom 6” with brick rubble and then filled it in with some of the very poor soil (to about 8” deep). Over this, I put down a sheet of weed matting, screwed to the inside of the raised bed to keep some very adventurous black wattle out of our veggie patch. Then we put in more soil to about 12” and put down a couple of inches of decomposed chook poo.

The chore now is to fill the rest of the veggie bed with more soil, compost, newspaper, soiled goat bedding, etc. After that, the veggie patch will need to be “rested-in” that is, allow the weeds to grow and blast them with glyphosate.

I still have some more sheets of roofing iron left over, so I will make some more compost bins. The goats make more compost than our current composting arrangement allows for.