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How To Build A Raised Garden Bed – GF Video
Learn how to build a raised garden bed in this video we made while building some for our own vegetable garden. This isn’t rocket science, not hard to do at all. Watch the video and start building.

Steps To Build A Raised Garden Bed
- Figure out the size of the bed.
- Purchase the lumber and hardware.
- Assemble the bed.
- Add soil and plant.
I like to build 4′ wide raised beds. The width is good for me, I can reach across the bed from either side. Plus, this width is great if you use floating row fabric or plastic mulch. You can cut the fabric to one width for all your beds. The mini greenhouse I built drops right on top of these beds. So yeah, I like this width.

For brackets to attach the sides of the bed, I use whatever I have. Shelf brackets, angle brackets, or the metal brackets you use for roof trusses, use what you got. They will all work and last longer than the wood itself.

Position the lumber where you want the bed to be, and build it in place. Don’t worry about making the bed super level. You can shovel out high spots, and some dirt will come out the bottom of the bed to fill in low spots.

After you are happy with the placement and assembly, drive in some pipes or rebar or metal stakes in the middle of each long board and secure with metal banding. This keeps the sides of the bed from warping out. You could use wood stakes, but I wouldn’t, it wont hold as well.

What kind of soil do I fill the raised bed with? I’m a big fan of the lasagna gardening method of filling up raised beds. Again its some of the ‘use what you got’ thing here, but assemble a mess of cardboard, straw, compost, soil. Watch this video.

If you don’t want to do the lasagna method, don’t use pure top soil, see if someone nearby sells a garden soil, its needs to have a mix of materials, not straight topsoil. Let me know your comments or questions below.
May 18, 2016
DIY Cold Frame From A Recycled Window – GF Video
Build this DIY Cold Frame with a window your neighbor is throwing out. I see windows out for the trash all the time, I could probably have built a whole greenhouse already! I like this home made cold frame for starting and growing salad greens, as they don’t get too tall, perfect for this rig. Watch the video:

Tips for building the DIY Cold Frame
- A wood frame window works best, but use what you’ve got, or what you’ve found.
- Be sure to prime and paint all surfaces.
- Install a thermatic vent to keep it from over heating.
Our cold frame has a thermatic vent built into the plan, so you don’t have to manually vent the cold frame greenhouse, you can buy one of these vents at a home improvement store. Buy the vent here.

What I also like here is we are recycling materials to build DIY cold frame. You can find old windows somewhere in your town, someone is most likely replacing their windows, and they will put out the old ones for trash pickup. Or check yard sales, or your own garage attic or barn, its very possible there is a window or two sitting there that you can use for this cold frame plan. Also consider using scrap plywood for this, it doesn’t have to look like fine furniture, its for the vegetable garden after all.

Be sure to paint the cold frame with primer and an outdoor latex paint, you may also want to wrap the edges of the plywood that touch the soil with duct tape to keep moisture from wicking up into the plywood. You could also use old garden hose to protect the wood. Slice open the hose along its length and slip the bottom of the cold frame into the slot in the garden hose.

If you want to extend your growing season, check out the books below, they are the ones we use!

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March 8, 2016
Fruit Walls from Low Tech Magazine – GF Radio 402

We talk about Fruit Walls, which we read about on the site Low Tech Magazine. Fruit Walls are tall thick walls made to absorb the heat of the sun and create a micro climate to grow warm weather fruits in France, Belgium and Europe.

This is where the espalier concept of pruning – training of a fruit tree came from, we think. The tree was trained to have lateral branches that would spread along the fruit wall and benefit from the heat being put off by the wall. Previous to reading this article we were clueless about this.

The fruit walls advanced with the addition of chimneys built into the walls, with fires burning in a part of the wall and the hot exhaust heating the walls.

By R&@E CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons & Low Tech Magazine

A neat version was a fruit wall with the addition of what was basically a window frame to become a greenhouse. As greenhouses became popular, the fruit wall became part of it, absorbing the heat of the day and keeping the greenhouse warm at night. This concept is still used in China today.

In late 19th century greenhouses as we know them today became popular, and fruit walls fell from favor.

We talk about the DIY mini greenhouses we have built, watch our greenhouse vids here.

Then the show starts going on a tangent into concrete, and how the Romans made really good concrete, which is called cement, depending on who you talk to and how its used.

There is a lot of this solar heating and hot beds examples at Colonial Williamsburg, Rick says. We’ll have to look into making a hot bed with horse manure.

Check out Scott’s garden articles on Medium.

January 11, 2016
The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener Book Review

I was looking forward to reading Nikki Jabbour’s The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener because my farming apprenticeship had a significant focus on season extension, as the farm is currently going into its twelfth month of continuous harvest. But we were growing in Virginia, whereas Ms. Jabbour has succeeded in maintaining a year-round garden in the more challenging Nova Scotian climate. Because of this, her book achieves its subtitle: How to Grow Your Own Food 365 Days a Year, No Matter Where You Live.

Listen to Nikki talk with Eric on GardenFork Radio here.

The book is chock full of information, from the basics (timing the seasons and intensive planting) to the complex (building structures to capture and maintain heat). It is comprehensive enough that a relative novice could start with The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener as a valuable resource. A more seasoned grower might be tempted to skip over some familiar-sounding sections, but I would urge you to read cover-to-cover as unique and useful tips are sprinkled throughout the entire text.

The chapter on winter gardening progresses from light protection (like row covers) to using an unheated greenhouse or building your own polytunnel, so a grower in any hardiness zone or variously sized growing space can find techniques to meet his or her needs. The plans to build your own cold frame or polytunnel are easy to follow and call for inexpensive materials. Plus, the chapter motived me with photos of lusciously green vegetables thriving alongside snow and ice.

Like many other gardening books, this one concludes with a crop index. Ms. Jabbour recommends specific cultivars based on cold or heat tolerance or days to maturity and includes an emphasis on vegetable varieties less talked about in other books; for example, Tatsoi has its own entry.

In short: I love this book. It’s a wonderful resource for year-round vegetable growing knowledge and inspiration. Now, if only I didn’t live in a studio apartment!

Order from Indie Bookstores here

Order from Amazon here. (affiliate links)

Grocery Gardening a new cooking gardening book that works

February 17, 2012

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