No Dig Garden Beds Finished – Hooray!

Huge Easter long weekend over here, garden wise. As Ringo said: “I got blisters on my fingers!” but it’s all worthwhile in the end. We managed to get the raised garden beds out the back built and filled with poo and hay in the no dig style. I used Stephanie Alexander’s method from her bible, er, book The Kitchen Garden Companion. Love this book. It’s got the most awesome recipe for a silverbeet tart *drool*. Ingredients are listed alphabetically and it includes details on how to grow, harvest and cook each one. It rocks. Not just taking a cook’s view on gardening here, the same method and poo and hay layer thicknesses are noted on this cool no-dig garden website.

So to start we ripped up the existing paving and made some raised beds (wow, that sentence doesn’t match the amount of effort at all – this took 2.5 days in total…)

I feel kinda sorry for the previous owners who laid all this paving. Ahem.

I’m really happy with the way the beds turned out. Doesn’t look like the lack of mortar will be a problem and it’s easy to shove ’em back in place! Love the bricks too – very pretty colours and much nicer than the paving.

The black blob is a seriously unphotogenic cat. She is a ninja. A very ungraceful ninja. Quite surprised she’s managing to keep her balance there to be honest.

With the beds built, a trip up to Greenlife Soils for bales of straw and pea hay and a trailer load of poo was in order.

Aaaand if you look to your right – straw!

10cm sections of the bales laid out tighly in  a mat. I watered in some seasol over this. These beds took 3 bales.

The pipes sticking out are for the greywater irrigation system that Pilot Boy is going to install when we get over the bruises from this weekend.

Next comes:

POO!

Around 5cm or less of blended sheep and cow manure, to be precise.

Can’t say I smelled too pretty at this point.

In fact, by way of a ‘good morning’ my retired neighbour came out and said “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!”. We have awesome neighbours 🙂

On top of the manure is a dense 20cm mat of pea hay.

I just peeled off the bale in sections.

These beds needed 6 bales to cover them: the rectangular bed has an area of 2.5sqm and the alien shaped one is 5sqm.

I love this photo. It looks so snug sitting in there 🙂

More seasol applied and we’re ready for….

…

…

MORE POO!!!

’nuff said.

Another <5cm layer of manure went on top.

We took yet another trip up to Greenlife for a trailer load of mushroom compost. This was spread in a 10cm layer and given a good soaking. Actually I watered in each layer as I chucked it down.

Aaand, we’re done! This will settle down to about the height of the beds once the material starts decomposing. A nice, rich organic mixture ready for planting! I’m going to leave it for a couple of weeks, although you can plant in it pretty much straight away by digging a hole and putting some potting mix in with your plant. The only upkeep they need is some more compost and mulching with pea hay every cropping season.  Very happy with the final result. I’m going to ram some stakes down the holes around the outside of the beds to help steady the bricks and fill the holes up with some fine gravel. This will also hopefully help with any excess drainage issues as well as looking good.

Now I’ve got to sow some seeds and get ready to plant. I have some pak choi, lettuce, a few carrots and one lone, surviving basil ready to go. Seedwise I’ll sow some spinach, silverbeet, snowpeas, beetroot, parsnips, herbs, rocket, broccoli…..and we’ll see what comes up!