We had completed the construction of our raised beds previously. The design has two layers of cinder block for a total height of 16". We constructed the cinder block beds right over the top of what used to be grass lawn. There are two problems we want to address with the beds, before we fill them with our soil mix.
1. Digging vermin like moles.
2. The pre-existing grass and weeds.
Before we get into the way we chose to address these, allow me to share a quick tip. See this photo:
The cinder block was set with the second layer overlapping the first and mortared into place. We then used Quickcrete to pour concrete into the two corner adjacent holes to hold the corners in place and add strength to the beds. Given that the foundation of the beds is just soil, some shifting is to be expected, but the walls of the bed doesn't have to do anything except contain the soil, so we believe this will work just fine. Now let's deal with the moles.
In order to prevent moles from tunneling up from below the soil bed and wreck havoc in our garden, we are going to lay out chicken wire on the base of the bed. In my scurry to get everything done in a compressed time frame after the freaking snow from the Winter from Hell finally melted, I built the beds before laying out the chicken wire. The better way would have been to get 5' wide chicken wire and lay it out where the bed walls would be and then construct the walls over the top of the wire so as to hold the wire in place properly. Failing to do that, we went with 4' wide chicken wire instead that fits snugly inside our 12' x 4' beds. The soil mix will be heavy enough to keep the wire in place, but we do have a weakness on the edges though. That, unfortunately, is a risk we're going to have to take.
Now let's look at the installation. We begin with our roll of chicken wire.
The easiest way is to place the chicken wire roll on one of the 12' side walls of the bed and then simply roll it out to the end of the wall.
Be careful not to roll off the edge as it could pull the chicken wire crooked and mess with your alignment.
As you roll this out, you will either need another person to hold down the starting point of the wire or you'll need to anchor it somehow. As I was working by myself on this, I staked down the wire in the starting corner with a piece of off cut EMT.
Now get your trusty tin snips and cut the wire. Be careful not to cut too short. You'd rather have some overlap which you can fold over than have the wire end up being too short.
Once done, the wire should be resting over the side wall like this.
Now simply remove the anchor and flip the chicken wire over into the bed. Stomp it down into the ground and fold over any overlap you may have.
That takes care of the moles. Now we need to take care of the existing grass and weeds that are at the bottom of the raised bed. In order to do that, we're going to cover the bottom with weed cloth. The reason for using weed cloth is to allow water to still drain out the bottom of the bed. We do not want to inhibit drainage in any way. Proper drainage is after all one of the main reasons we built a raised bed and filled it with our special soil mix in the first place. The layout of our planting plan and the design of our row caterpillars resulted in our soil beds having just slightly more than 4' between them. This allows us to roll out the 4' wide weed cloth perfectly between the beds. Start by placing the weed cloth roll on one 4' end of the target soil bed and unrolling it to the other 4' end.
Now use your trusty box cutter to cut the weed cloth. Be careful as they're sharp!!! ALWAYS CUT AWAY FROM YOUR BODY AND FINGERS!!!
Lastly, simply flop the weed cloth over into the raised bed bottom and fold over any overlap.
Congratulations! Your raised bed is now ready to be filled with our special soil mix.
Join us again tomorrow when we'll look at the construction of the half hoops for the caterpillar tunnels we'll be using for season extension.
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