Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Chatting => Design and Construction => Topic started by: Floody on November 03, 2015, 21:02
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Hi, I'm thinking of converting my allotment to a series of raised beds but as it's 200 square yards, that's an awful lot of edging! I've searched online for used scaffold boards, but they aren't cheap and there's the problem of delivery too...
I found a video on Youtube where a guy takes pallets apart and uses those as edging for raised beds.
Has anyone on here used pallets for such a purpose? And if so, how long did they last before they rotted?
Thanks in advance for the advice! :)
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Mine were rotted through by the 3rd summer :(
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Yes have used and still use Pallets for raised beds. Not very raised (4 inches) and do need maintenance, but cheap a good cheap supply of edging and 3 years sounds good value for money.
Paddy
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Mine were rotted through by the 3rd summer :(
We built some using pallet wood, I was able to get hold of some 10ft pallets. They've lasted 2 years. Were planning to build more but didn't get round to it. On a personal level I've yet to be convinced that the time and effort and cost is worth it.
Have seen videos of plots that have them and they do look good , one was a retired doctor from Liverpool.
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Any wood rots after only a few years pallets quicker than most. I've converted my allotment to raised beds but I don't have any edges I've just piled the soil up. The thing I found I needed to do was to make the paths between the beds with weed suppressant so that the soil could just be scraped back onto the beds when it drifted onto the paths.
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My raised beds are now well into their 5th year and showing no sign of rot. Made entirely of pallets I took the pallets apart and soaked the timber for a week in an old large tin bath using a solution of 75% creocoat 15% white spirit substitute and 10% waste engine oil. Left to dry for a week before construction.
Nothing drown has shown any form of disease or polution and they should be fine for the next 5 years.
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Here's a neat idea for raised beds that will last for as long as you need it....currently using this idea to build up mulch around my fruit trees.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVaFsORKhl8 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVaFsORKhl8)
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I do the something similar to Headgardener: long, narrow beds with just earth raked up at the sides to form a lip. Cheap, virtually no maintenance, no nasty chemicals and nothing to catch on my Mantis either. I don't even bother with weed suppressant, though the weeds on the paths can be a nuisance, but not an insuperable one.
I have 12 beds of about 14 metres long plus some others in a more sheltered spot. Building walls around them using any kind of material isn't really feasible.
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I do a mixture of HG22 and Snoop, In general my beds are about 4ft wide. Some I use old wood propped up to keep the soil in situ with tent pegs or wooden stakes each side of the upright to keep it straight. However I don't have enough wood to do this on all beds so some are just built up soil but this tends to end up sloping and thus wastes some space on each side. In the last 18 months I have cleared and covered all side paths with heavy duty membrane which is still looking good and not breaking up. I am so pleased that I took time and effort to do it. They aren't covered in wood chips though my main path is. I think some pictures are called for, though I don't have any to hand right now!
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I agree raised beds can look great, & if conditions require are a great way of adding extra drainage on wet soggy ground,clay etc. But I do feel that they are hard work when as others have said narrow beds etc work just as well. In my old garden I used some old joists to construct raised beds but now I have the allotment just have long narrow beds with slab bed paths inbetween. I aim never to stand on the soil & use a scaffold board to stand on when planting etc, my balance has improved over the years too😊
Here you can see hubby rotovating one of the beds on Friday
(http://i1056.photobucket.com/albums/t371/snowdrops3/Mobile%20Uploads/2014-03/F36E004C-DD53-4149-9488-FDBE9F9B5361_zpshvomnvll.jpg) (http://s1056.photobucket.com/user/snowdrops3/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2014-03/F36E004C-DD53-4149-9488-FDBE9F9B5361_zpshvomnvll.jpg.html)
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I took apart numerous pallets to build four large beds 5 x 6 metres, and within these beds subdivided up with tough permeable membrane 40cm wide. I put it all together in 2012 and four years later it still looks ok.
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I do the something similar to Headgardener: long, narrow beds with just earth raked up at the sides to form a lip. Cheap, virtually no maintenance, no nasty chemicals and nothing to catch on my Mantis either. I don't even bother with weed suppressant, though the weeds on the paths can be a nuisance, but not an insuperable one.
I have 12 beds of about 14 metres long plus some others in a more sheltered spot. Building walls around them using any kind of material isn't really feasible.
14 meters - that's a long way to walk around. I read somewhere that somebody had done a study (don't they love stupid studies) about the ideal length for raised beds and found it was about 5 meters (I think). At that length people would walk around the bed, rather than across it. I must admit with my 7m beds (caused by the width of the plot not any science) I walk around the bed rather than across them.
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It's easy enough to put a board across if you do find you are walking across beds, or for use when planting in the middle of the bed.
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I have 12 beds of about 14 metres long plus some others in a more sheltered spot. Building walls around them using any kind of material isn't really feasible.
14 meters - that's a long way to walk around. I read somewhere that somebody had done a study (don't they love stupid studies) about the ideal length for raised beds and found it was about 5 meters (I think). At that length people would walk around the bed, rather than across it. I must admit with my 7m beds (caused by the width of the plot not any science) I walk around the bed rather than across them.
They're very narrow - 70 cm or so, so can easily be jumped/stepped over - and all run in the same direction east to west. My watering methods (butts at each end of each bed) and rotation (3 beds per rotation group) mean that there is very rarely a need to cross them.