Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required)
Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch to Fully Featured
Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe
__,_._,___
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
[papercreters] Re:Raised Garden Bed in New Jersey
Wow Gardening Revolution on paperCrete I'm now tickled.
I have been visiting spaceman's site for years but did not join the paper Crete digest till last year.
I had started playing with different mixes till my foot decided to crumble from the inside with some sort of bone problem. (really I blame it all on 94lb sacks of cement.)
I tried the raised beds from gardening revolution and there nice. Bricks are expensive but work. If you have time to make large bricks out of papercrete do it. The only thing to remember is that you will need some support poles to help hold up the taller plants. As the soil mix that Mr. Pense (Dad) uses will not support tall plants without help.
I tried a small tomato plot with some simple blocks and they worked just fine. Please keep in mind that I was playing with different mixes and using scrap cement from local sites. Like hanging around when the brick people were finishing up and getting the last of bags of mortar mix or what ever was there, extra sand in buckets ect. I even got half a bag of white Portland when one crew finished, which made nice white bricks. Ok so what I was mixing was more like large plates than bricks but at least I was getting started.
I saw no evidence of leaching just remember your making the mix so don't put things in that you don't want in your food.
The soil mix that is used on Gardening Revolution is really self-supporting it does not really push-out on the walls. Just remember never step in your bed. Keep the size to 4 feet in width or less. better yet get the book it's only 12.50 and well worth the download it has the instructions just visit www.gardeningrevolution.com then click on the book icon.
Take it easy on the site it was my first attempt at doing a web page and it seems to function ok. No fancy flash or anything just one simple mov. (and Dad seems to like it) It was my first attempt at doing a web page. So when you visit don't break it. : )
I did not have enough cash to build a second bed like the first so I hunted for clean used pallets. I used several and just cut them down to size and pieced in other boards to cover the open spaces. It works ok but I will be taking it out this year. It was not as stable as I would like and you can't sit on it. I like the cinderblocks I just don't like the cost of them.
I had to cleanup my area where I was doing my mixing I had several different sizes of blocks so some got nailed to the fence (with nail gun) and some ended up in the garden. I will take some pictures later and let every one see. I'll put them up on my temp site www.websbylen.com I don't think my simple mixes need to be on the official site but you can look and tell me different.
So that's quite a lot for a first post but I really couldn't resist as Dad's site was mentioned.
Have a great year everyone.
Daniel
__._,_.___ Your email settings: Individual Email|Traditional
