Laziest Way to Start a Raised Garden Bed

Compost pile today, raised garden bed tomorrow

Being old, cheap and lazy, I started my new vegetable garden with a compost pile on cardboard for a total investment of 17 USD, plus trash.

Once Upon a Time

About 12 years ago at my house in Dallas, Texas, I had lots of energy and initiative. And I wanted a big garden. The best garden. An organic show garden!

So I studied and implemented the "perfect" method to prepare a raised organic bed:

1. Scraped back the turf.
2. Laid out 2 palettes of cinder blocks to 800 square feet (75 square meters) of growing area.
3. Shoveled out a truckload of partially composted manure/soil mix.
4. Mixed in green sand, organic sugar, lava sand and I don't know what else.
5. Laid hundreds of feet of drip hose.
6. Covered with mulch.
7. Bought and planted countless seedlings.

My father-in-law at the time said, "This isn't a garden: It's a food production facility!" Of course, it also cost me a week of labor to set up (and that was with help), lots of labor after, and 2-3 thousand USD, but the tomatoes were impressive. Until summer heat took over, and I let it all run to weeds ... for two years in a row.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

This time around, I wanted to go with my "more mature" cheap and lazy philosophy:

• Start small.
• Don't spend much, if anything.
• Don't work too hard.
• Be patient; take the long view.

For years, I've heard that you can start a garden bed with newspaper or cardboard. The paper layer smothers the grass below, and over many months it composts down. 

Most directions say to put a layer of mulch over the paper, but I don't have mulch lying around, and don't want to buy any. So I just started a compost pile on top:

1. Cut up a huge cardboard shipping box to a square.
2. Laid 12 cinder blocks (17 USD) at the cardboard edges, holes up to later fill with soil and plants.
   (I like cinder blocks because, unlike a wood frame, they don't decompose, and I don't have to do carpentry.)
3. Piled up grass and weed cuttings from when I cleaned up my back yard.
4. Added compostables:
• Fruit and veggie scraps
• Eggshells
• Torn up paper
• Crushed natural charcoal (waste from a bag that got left in the rain)
• Dried, ground chicken bones
5. Soaked it well with the garden hose.

Now, I just add more compostables, soak it with the hose if we haven't had any rain, and mix it up every week or two. Later, I may add some soil when I dig holes to plant trees. In six months or so, I'll have a prepared bed with excellent soil.

To get a bigger garden, I'll just extend the cinder block frame and start the process again, stopping when I have a garden "right-sized" to my needs and energy.

#composting #soil #gardening