The final part of the poly-tunnel infrastructure, if you’ll forgive the parlance, has been to install some raised beds … an expense I hadn’t truly accounted for, or indeed, appreciated. Once I’d measured it out I realised I required 63m of wood, not a quantity I was going to fit in the back of my tiny hatchback on a visit to the local DIY store! I ended up ordering some 215mm x 18mm untreated softwood from a timber merchant in Glasgow which gives a fairly reasonable depth of bed, it also came in 4.8m lengths making it difficult to handle but was ideal for making the length of beds we were doing – two of them are 30ft long.
I also took delivery 2 tons of topsoil on the same day (Friday), I ordered this much based on the damned fool notion that, ‘a ton is a lot, and therefore two tons is an awful lot‘. As it turns out 2 tons is around 6 tons less than we actually need!?
On Saturday, Jolene’s belated birthday, we spent the morning cleaning out our manky radiators so that they work through the winter and then I spent the afternoon making the first raised bed, 30ft x 2ft, and then started filling it with soil. On Sunday I started at about 8.30am and finished at around 5.30pm with a 20 minute break for lunch somewhere in there, a hard days graft shifting the soil for the beds, slate for the path and working in a reasonably hot environment in the tunnel … and you should see the route I had to push the barrow!
In the end though this is the result …
… and our first (only?) produce …
From start to finish this has been something of a mammoth garden project, although not so difficult as I had feared or the nay-sayers had insinuated. Certainly the most difficult aspect was getting the poles into the ground and yet, even at that, this was largely due to the extremely stoney nature of the soil into which we were digging, more on that here.
And even when it came to getting the cover on, the part that the doom-sayers had effectively said we’d never manage we succeeded despite all the warnings and sharp intakes of breath. The only real difficulty was being short a pair of hands, and that was something that fate had accounted for even if we hadn’t. You can read more about that episode here.
Tags: garden, poly tunnel
That looks great! It’s good to see the internal layout. We’re about to take the plunge ourselves and your posts have been interesting – happy harvests!
Thanks for dropping by!
The layout is a pretty big part of simply figuring the whole thing out, I’ll maybe post up some of the alternatives I went through in the next few days if that’s any help.
Oh, and there’s now more at http://grownstuff.co.uk
Yes, you confused me with your name link to grow stuff – I sat there thinking “I’m sure I posted a comment?”
There’s very little we could find on the web about layout in terms of what people actually finds works. As you say, it’s important and so it was good to see your pics.
Ah! sorry about that, I was just in the process of setting up GrownStuff when you posted your comment, it threw me a bit because I thought it had been posted there rather than here iyswim!
I’ll make a post on GrownStuff as soon as I get a chance :)