Photo by Jessica Walliser I can finally cross building raised beds for my asparagus off of my to-do list. |
I’m checkin’ something off the to-do list, and it’s a big ticket item—how I love it when that happens!
I spent yesterday building raised beds and planting my asparagus in them. The lumber for the raised beds has been sitting in the garage since autumn, so it’s nice to have the project completed … and in only two and a half hours! I’m sore, of course, from doing so much work so quickly, but it’s a good kind of sore. You know what I mean.
I built the raised beds out of cedar planks that the hardware store cut into 6-foot and 3-foot lengths. They are fastened together with a simple metal bracket and screws on each corner. Nothing fancy, but they work perfectly.
I built them in the garage—I couldn’t find a level spot anywhere in the backyard—and carried them up to the veggie garden. They were placed on either side of the back gate on the outside of the fence, and I dug out a bit of sod to get them to sit relatively level.
Next, I grubbed up the sod, which was certainly sparse to begin with, and turned over the existing soil down about a foot. I added a few shovels of compost and then laid out the asparagus crowns I got from The Cooks Garden. Seventy-five crowns filled the two raised beds perfectly.
After that, I filled the raised beds to the top with a mixture of leaf compost, homemade compost, leftover potting soil and dirt, burying the crowns a good 5 to 6 inches deep. I know the cedar eventually will need to be replaced, but I’m hoping to get a good six or eight years out of it. By then, of course, the asparagus will really be cranking it out—I hope so, anyway!
