Raised Bed Project
If you don’t have the luxury of digging in your yard to start planting, a raised bed is a fantastic alternative to any gardener. They are versatile, easy to make, and are actually less maintenance than regular container pots. I have never made one myself, but recently my boyfriend Danny has gotten the nerve to actually build one himself!
He currently lives in Los Feliz, a quaint area of LA near East Hollywood. The property he lives on doesn’t have its own yard, just a concrete driveway and a small courtyard out front with a fig tree. Despite this lack of green space he thought of a great substitute, which was to place a raised bed on top of the road verge (the green strip of land between the road and sidewalk). It’s a great location because it has enough space for a full sized bed frame and it’s directly outside his housing complex. He also had another motive for planting it on the sidewalk. He wants the residents of his neighborhood to partake in the vegetable garden, a project he tentatively names 4LosFeliz. No cash or donations, he just wants recyclable bottles in exchange for produce, and putting that money from the recycling back into his raised bed garden.
He used some found scrap wood and and drilled them together into a rectangular frame. By the way a base board at the bottom is not needed. The point is to place this over soil and that will be your drainage system. It will also give nutrients back to the soil.
When he started filling in the raised bed, he put a couple inches of yard trimmings that was taken out of road verge. This will add some more nitrogen to the soil, which is a necessary nutrient for plants. Then he filled the rest of the bed with topsoil. The topsoil we got was in bulk from a nursery and we shoveled it into the back of my Chevy Malibu on a hot day and chugged it all the way from Torrance to Los Feliz. Oh the things my boyfriend puts me through.
After shoveling the soil in the bed frame, we realized the spot he picked out wasn’t getting any sunlight because it was blocked off by the tree leaves. So of course we did what we had to do, which was to unfortunately cut some of the branches off. Danny likes climbing trees anyway and is handy with a saw, so he was up to the task. It didn’t take a huge chunk of the tree off though. It did make a huge difference with the amount of sunlight that we were able to let through!
This was before we cut down the branches from the trees so the sunlight can shine through.
Now the next part was to create a blueprint of where we wanted to plant the veggies. We needed to plant squash, cucumber, green beans, and marigolds. Some plants require much more space than others to allow their roots to spread properly. Squash and cucumbers need about 4 feet apart, while greens beans only need a few inches from each other. It did take awhile to come up with an effective layout. The squash and cucumber are both vining plants, so we decided to place a trellis in the middle.
After we figured out the layout, we saturated the soil with water and planted our plants. And that’s it! Here is the result:
This was a three day project from beginning to end. So far we have gotten nothing but positive comments on it. I’m proud that my boyfriend has accomplished a hefty challenge and doing good for his neighborhood. Now it a just a matter of patience and TLC.
