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I am really into vegetable gardening but my garden has been hammered SO hard over the past ten years by predatory wildlife. I have tried fencing, trenching, and chemical deterents. The only thing that I have not tried is a Junk Yard Dog. (Don't want one.)
My vegetable plots were always in the ground, but for next year, I want to try Raised Beds. I have researched many alternatives online and I think that I will go with Concrete Block raised beds. I know that there is uncertainty over Cinder Blocks, and the chemicals they might leach, so I will go with Concrete Blocks.
Why I like them:
Cheap (ish)
Configurable.
The brick block holes allow room for flowers and herbs or securing various trellises or stakes and supports for various netting and frost preventing coverings.
I really want to install a self-watering mechanism. I have Googled a lot and found various Self-Watering tutorials for wood built or adaptions of various steel containers such as feed troughs. There is very little out there about designing self-watering for block-built raised beds. My (potential) beds are located hundreds of feet away from my plumbing.
Can anybody who has successfully built Self Watering Concrete Block raised beds advise?
Thank you Cambium. That gadget certainly looks cool, but there are a flurry of one-star reviews on Amazon. A lot of customers complain that it soon breaks, and, if it doesn't break soon, it won't work for a second season. They claim that the water flow valve sticks open. If that happened to me, it would cost me several hundred dollars a day, so I am somewhat hesitant. How long and frequently have you used yours? Have you noticed reliability issues?
The raised bed gardens around here are also used to terrace the hillside. I've found them to be much more productive than an inground garden, not exactly sure why. Maybe because there isn't any need for walkways so the garden can be more condensed? Maybe because the water and fertilizers are only put where the veggies are? Maybe because it's so much easier to weed at three feet off the ground?
The house is on a hill and there's also this grass around here called 'Guinea grass' and/or elephant grass. My neighbor calls it "demon grass" because it grows like crazy and is hard to control. On a hillside, it's hard to mow.
This is the site for raised bed garden #4. Getting rid of the Guinea grass was almost more work than building the garden. The raised beds that we have are a constructed garden, not just stacked concrete masonry units. If it were just one or two layers high, then it probably wouldn't need staking, but three or four layers of bricks high and it needs something to hold it together since wet soil is pretty heavy.
There were a bunch of fence post cut offs at our local transfer station (dump) so they were really handy to use as reinforcement in the holes of the concrete masonry units. The CMUs are just set on the ground, I don't know if pouring a concrete base would be worthwhile or not, but I didn't do anything other than set the CMUs on the ground and stake them with the sections of fence posts.
The whole thing is lined with weed mat. Maybe weeds aren't as vigorous in your area, but around here they can get downright vicious so anything to help keep them out is really good.
I put tall wooden fence posts at the corners so they can hold up chicken and sheep fencing. I'd thought about making wood framed 'gates' which would swing out so it would be easy to tend the garden, but just a section of chicken wire was enough to keep the chickens out and the sheep mostly stay back in their pasture behind the gardens. They're pretty handy when it's time to clear out the garden, though.
The soil here is somewhat acid, so probably the CMUs help sweeten that a bit. We also add in oyster shell (like what is fed to chickens to strengthen eggshells) since we get about eight feet of rain each year and that washes away a lot of nutrients. Hydrated lime would just vanish. We also add in bio-char (charcoal without any chemicals) since that traps the nutrients before they can wash away and the plant roots can get it out of the charcoal. Then rabbit manure since we have bunnies. So after the gardens are built, they're pretty inexpensive to keep going.
If you're in a really dry area or water is expensive, than lining it with plastic sheeting on the sides and weed mat on the bottom may work better for you.
If I were to do this again, I'd run a galvanized water pipe up through the bricks so there'd be a water connection right at the side of the garden. I can still do that, but the water pipe would be outside the bricks since I'm not taking it apart just to run a water pipe.
I really want to install a self-watering mechanism. I have Googled a lot and found various Self-Watering tutorials for wood built or adaptions of various steel containers such as feed troughs. There is very little out there about designing self-watering for block-built raised beds. My (potential) beds are located hundreds of feet away from my plumbing.
Can anybody who has successfully built Self Watering Concrete Block raised beds advise?
If so,so many thanks
I see most of your posts are in Virginia forums, so I'd have to assume you get an adequate amount of rainfall for a good portion of the growing season...is there a way you can harvest and store rainwater for your water source ? For examples of/supplies for drip irrigation see Berry Hill Irrigation (right here in VA).
Can anybody who has successfully built Self Watering Concrete Block raised beds advise?
If so,so many thanks
I did not build out of concrete block but with 2 X 12 X 8' wood. I could assemble them in 20 minutes and they're good for 8-10 years based on my prior experience.
What I want to show you is my self-watering drip system. I built them out of PVC pipes and just drill 1/16" holes along the way for dripline. It has lasted 14-15 years so far from sun & cold.
Another thing I want to show you is how I build up my soil for the 12 inch height. I did not have enough compost (not enough grass clippings) so I use straw bale to build them up, I also spread alfalfa pellets over the top to give them some nitrogen & nutrient source, then I spread cow/chicken manures with garden soil on top. The straw bale will compost over the summer-fall and reduce down to 1/4 by the winter. The vegetables just love the end result of composted soil and they grow vigoruously.
My (potential) beds are located hundreds of feet away from my plumbing.
Just wanted to address your plumbing issue.
You'll notice my plumbing rise from the ground to provide water for my raised bed. My source of water was about 25-30 feet away from an existing sprinkler system. What I did was to dig a trench from the source to where my raised bed is and connect it into the existing water line.
If you're unsure on how to do this, just hire a landscaper/ gardener. The price of PVC pipes are inexpensive. Then you will have an automated drip system.
Thank you all for the helpful advice. I particularly appreciated the pictures – it’s always fun to peek into people’s gardens. I may have issues with wildlife constantly raiding my garden but at least I don’t have sheep wandering through it like hotzcatz does.
Currently I am sunmapping my small back yard to figure out best placement for my bed. www.suncalc.org has been helpful.
Any raised bed I create has to have protection on six sides. I have been buying crop cages from Gardener Supply but that has gotten expensive as the animals chew and rip through it, so I am currently looking up how to build cheap replaceable crop cages using PVC framing and a chickenwire skirt overlaid with birdnetting. I plan to line the bottom with hardware cloth. I also plan to use a modified Hugelkultur fill for the bottom of the bed.
Thank you HB2HSV for the DIY irrigation pictures. I hope to do a slightly modified version of this using some old drip line I have on hand for the lateral lines and adding a hose bib to the PVC frame. Thanks for the suggestions Gemstone but I don’t want to invest major bucks in rain barrels and other irrigation systems at this time. My area of Virginia usually has (mostly) adequate rainfall during the growing season but I remember the savage 2007 D4 drought that lasted two years.
I plan to grow several tomatoes in 5-gallon buckets this year and maybe lay down some more hardware cloth under and a PVC and netting frame over those. I am also very interested in trying a really cheap Raised Bed idea I found on Youtube that shows how to make a small raised bed from cardboard and chicken wire.
I think that would be an interesting experiment for growing carrots and potatoes. I have tried growing both in my inground garden but they were abject failures.
I had raised beds made of cinder block. I filled them with a mixture 50/50 of coarse sand and compost. What was extra nice about the beds was that I made a framework of PVC pipe over the beds, held in place by sticking the ends down into the holes in the cinder block. Then garden film over the framework and a spotlight for heat set onto a thermostat and I was able to greatly extend my growing season.
Mostly, raised beds are to save my knees when weeding.
Last edited by oregonwoodsmoke; 01-23-2022 at 12:44 PM..
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