Building a Backyard Flower Farm: Adding Raised Rows

It feels like a million years ago (but also just yesterday and actually 7ish years) that my friend Cathy introduced me to two major loves: cloth diapers and square foot gardens/raised beds. She's a wealth of information and when she told me about square foot gardening, I couldn't get enough. The first year, we put in 3 4x4 boxes. No digging and tilling, just building the boxes and filling with a mix of compost, peat moss and vermiculite. The next year we added 3 more 4'x4' boxes, 2 2'x8' boxes, 2 4'x8' boxes and 2-and-4-years-old drama.

So when we decided to add a larger spot for flowers this year, I started to think about the boxes and how we should set it up to make the most use of the space.  Tight rows seems like a assumed choice, but after gardening in raised beds for the past 4 years and seeing how much easier it was to deal with weeds, digging and tilling all of that space seemed daunting.  I would have done it, but I wanted to see if I could find a better way, so I started digging around a bit online and stumbled upon this post on raised rows.  

Here's the thing about raised beds/rows, though: dirt is expensive!  If you're not digging it up in your own yard and need to bring it in, it'll eat up your budget like crazy.  I just want to say that because if you start to research, you're going to see that.  The only reason we've been able to fill so many spaces with dirt is because we have a township nearby that sells leaf compost for $10 per truckload.  And it's amazing compost! Dark and loose and earthy and actually composted.  So, if you have a composting center nearby, that's probably a good bet to be able to bring in dirt affordably. 

So here's our easy process for building the garden:
1. Before the day you need to build, measure your space and decide how you'll lay out and space your rows. I considered some different setups that involved more spiraling sort of patterns, but the rows were easiest to make sure that we can access each row since we'll need to put a fence around it to attempt to keep critters out. I also  knew I wanted to try to maximize my space used, but still wanted a decent walkway space, so the 30'x15' space is divided into 7 3' rows with 6 1.5' walkways between.
2. Lay down weed barrier, being sure to overlap enough that grass won't poke through.  If you want to and it isn't a crazy windy day, add a layer of straw under the weed barrier.  If you have an Aldi nearby, they had 3'x50' rolls for $3.50 - the same size at Home Depot is $9.99.
3. Use chalk and/or a chalk line to measure and mark your rows on each side of your space.  Once I marked the edges and spacing on each side, my brother and I used a chalk line to make a line to mark off each row and walkway while John went to get the dirt.  
4. Bring in the dirt! We thought 2 truckloads would be enough, but we needed to fill our already established boxes as well and I still want to add more to the new flower space, so that's going to happen this weekend with one more load of dirt. We laid the dirt down the rows first to make sure we' filled right to the edges of the lines.
5. Add walkways.  We happened to have a bunch of bags of mulch leftover in our shed, so we went with mulch, but straw would also work well . Again we underestimated, so this week I'm going to be hauling a lot more mulch for the walkways.  The bags of mulch make it easier here because you can just open them and pull them right along the straight walkways.
6. Plant! I'm still sitting on my hands waiting to get the seeds and starts planted.  We're in Zone 6A and our solid last frost date is typically at the end of April/beginning of May.  This year is an experiment, but I am erring on the conservative side because I need all of these flowers to grow! The cold lasted so long this year and this week is still going to have some nighttime temps in the low 40s, so this weekend will see another load of dirt and next week seeds will start to go in.  These 3' rows will see a variety of spacing, depending on the actual flower growing, but they're going to be packed in there. Most will have 3-4 rows of flowers planted in an offset pattern like this to utilize the most space.

So, still to do to finish this spot:  Add more compost.  Add more mulch.  Plant seeds/seedlings.  Add two rain barrels for watering. Fence it all in. Slowly but surely it's happening! .

Here's the process in photos on the day we put down the dirt and the following morning:

It's still a work-in-progress, but I can't wait until everything is planted and starts blooming and I can share flowers with all of you!

p.s. Don't miss out! Only one day left to get the Early Bird Deal on 2014 Flower CSA Subscriptions!