Almost finished

The new raised vegetable garden is almost finished. We still need to mulch the path between the beds, and put up the deer fence around it, as well as the door at one end. We (and by we, I mean my husband) made it with cedar posts sunk into the ground about a foot, and untreated pine 2x10s. The pine will rot faster than a treated pine or cedar, but cedar was too expensive and I didn't want any treated wood touching my vegetable garden.


The beds are 14 feet long, 30 inches high and 30 inches deep. The depth was determined by how far I can reach from the middle aisle. I filled the bottom with anything organic I could find: all of the stuff from cleaning up the garden, the sod pulled from the middle aisle, uncomposted compost and lots and lots of leaves. Then I filled it with a combination of pulverized topsoil and Soillife Compost (great stuff sold by Minor's Garden Center). I also added a bit of composted manure. For now I will just mulch around the outside as well (in the distance you can see the large pile of itty bitty pine chips leftover from grinding out some tree stumps that I think will do the job perfectly), but in the future I'll probably plant some deer resistant perennials there (nepeta comes to mind) to pretty it up a little.