Raising the Bed
In 2015, one of the first things we did to our Northshore Auckland New Zealand property was to get a landscape architect to design us new yards front and back. We felt new landscaping would make a world of difference for the property. One of the beds he designed was an inground 1m by 4m bed in the backyard to visually separate the veggie areas from the ‘lawn’. He recommended five ballerina apples and a lot of wood chips. As is usually the case, this all sounded and looked fantastic the first few months after installation.
Backyard of Lovely Bones right after the landscapers finished the new gardens
Now he was a lovely young man with many good ideas and it did look pretty, but I’m not entirely certain he understood the implications of the Northshore being functionally a thin layer of top soil resting on the purest clay imaginable. The substrate of our backyard has clay of such quality you could use it to throw fine porcelain. If I ever get into making my own pots, great. For gardening, not so great.
Over the years, I more or less ignored that bed. I had two lovely high raised beds to pretend to garden in, plenty of room to kill a succession of capsicum, tomatoes, and lettuces. I dabbled and dipped. I think this blog will have many entries in the future about how incredibly bad I was at gardening, but this isn’t the time to go into. Ignoring the apple bed resulted over the years in the dirt and rocks mingling, a succession of apple trees and sundry other plants drowning, the kikuyu attempting to take over, and a lot of dead chard. The ballerina apples which are genetically designed to grow vertically to 3 metres struggled from day one and never topped 1.5m. Every winter without fail the bed turned into a sodden, anaerobic hellscape. One year, Jaime managed to somehow get strawberries to grow, but mostly this bed was a graveyard for unloved seedlings I set out to die.
The apple bed after years of neglect and frustration
Fast forward a year into our permaculture learning journey, and it is abundantly clear to us now that something must be done with this bed. The more we learn, the more we need to undo everything we’ve done previously. In this case, the challenge is to take a strip of in ground sludge and convert it into a usable, slightly raised bed. This bed is so central to our garden. It is literally centre stage in the yard. It gets full sun year-round. It has the potential to be part of a long term flood control system, reducing storm water runoff from the back of the property to the front. In short, it is ideal for a strong intervention to improve it, worth time and effort and a bit of expense.
Our solution to this particular problem is backbreaking labour, a few boards, and a lot of chicken mulch. First, we dug out all the soggy soil down to the clay. I say ‘all’ as if that was a big ask. The soil only went down about 30 cm.
DrC working on the edge of the raised bed
Then I went through with a pitch fork and poked a lot of holes. The theory here is that by forking the clay, we create some easier channels for both water and roots to dive down a bit farther below the clay lining of the back yard. When I say this stuff is awful, sodden gluggy glue, I do not exaggerate.
Doesn’t this just look wonderful for growing stuff? sigh
We then laid down about 30cm of chicken mulch. Now your local gardening store sells this stuff in $19 bags. Part of me gets a bit righteously indignant about the price of chicken mulch. Because to make chicken mulch all you need is a whole lot of free chopped greens from your local landscaper or arborist and a half dozen chickens. You put the two together for a few months and >poof< about $500 worth of chicken mulch. However, I get it. Not everyone can do this. We can so we did. It was wet, though, and really super heavy to move from the chicken run to the bed.
Bed full of chicken mulch up to ground level with boardson one side to raise
So now with high fertilised, course brown matter from the clay layer to the ground layer, we surrounded the bed in timber. That was the expensive bit of this project. I need to do some research on pallet wood. We then turned all the top soil back into the bed. By this time it had drained a bit and wasn’t quite so wet and stinky. It was still heavy AF.
Finally, I took a bunch of leftover sunflower seedlings and threw them at the ground. I doubt they’ll do much. This has not exactly been a banner year for sunflowers. I surrounded the sunflowers in tik beans, dwarf beans, and a cup of Autumn Manure Mix and tiller radishes. I know it’s only early Feb but this year has been such a lost cause, it doesn’t feel premature to use a fall/winter cover crop.
Raised bed with a few seedlings and a lot of invisible potential
The plan is to give this bed until June with the cover crop. I’ll chop and drop at that point and possibly dig in with some long DTM food items like onions or garlic. Then I’ll report on the outcome.
As with everything we do on Lovely Bones, this is an experiment. Ideally, what we’ll see now is that this bed drains into the French drainage system under the gravel walking path. Rather than having sodden soils with wet rotting root systems, we’ll have healthy plants with strong root systems that over time break down the margins of the clay layer. The bed will act as a bit of a sponge during the rainy season, reducing runoff. It also increases our sunny growing space by almost 30%. If the experiment is a success in even one of these goals, we’ll have a really valuable bit of information on how to set up our garden beds on Zombie Apocalypse.
