2.2 KiB
+++ categories = ["plants"] date = 2024-04-23T13:53:30Z description = "" draft = false slug = "2024-garden" title = "🥕 2024 Garden" author = "nicholas" +++
Raised Bed Vegetable Garden
In April 2023 I built a raised bed out of recycled deck boards that were harvested from a disassembled old project (a wooden deck mounted atop the latter rack of my truck). The original lumber was pressure-treated and stained, which in some ways was ideal and in other ways possibly bad. It was suitable for outdoor use and for contact with the ground on account of the treatments, which is great, but for the same reasons it was also a hazard for the many chemicals that may leech into the soil and may be absorbed into the plant. After some amount of research and consideration, we decided that we would be fine.
Construction
The garden bed is roughly 6' x 4' x 16" and contains three layers, presented in the same order found in the garden bed:
- bagged topsoil from Home Depot.
- 1 cubic yard layer of "topsoil" from a local compost business
- mulch
Topsoil
To acquire and transport the topsoil, we lined the bed of my truck with a thick plastic tarp and stood back to watch a skid steer operator dump the dirt precisely between the beams of the ladder rack. When we arrived back at the house, I backed the truck into the yard and positioned the truck so that the tailgate would overhang the garden bed, and the dirt could simply be shoveled to the rear. Once enough dirt was shoveled out, we could drag the tarp out of the back, bringing with it the remaining dirt. It was quick compared to any other method I could think of.
Growth Time-lapse
Each time I visited to help water and prune, I tried to remember to photograph the planter. Later I would create a stack of the images in Photoshop and use the auto-alignment tool to give the time-lapse some smoothness. Below is the result. This coarse-grained, very short time-lapse covers the day the plants were transplanted (sometime in April), to mid-July when the first tomatoes fully ripened.
{{< video src="videos/garden-timelapse.webm" width="100%"
}}
Photos
Vegetable Garden
{{< gallerynew name="vegetable-garden-gallery" >}}
Herb Garden
{{< gallerynew name="herb-garden-gallery" >}}