When it comes to backyard vegetable gardens one thing is clear, everyone wants a taste of the bounty! To lessen the chance of intruders coming into our space, we worked to add a fence around the space and to build wood raised beds to hold the actual plants.
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If you’re just jumping into our journey to build a backyard vegetable garden you might to check out part 1 explaining our goals and to see the “before” area we planned to build on.
Once we picked a spot, we brought some the tape measure, some flags to mark the spot and we planned out the four corners of our garden fence. We picked up a hole digger that included a ruler on the side and dug down 30 inches. Of course, we always had some supervisors as we did it. :)
After digging down 24 inches, Derek added a few about 6 inches of gravel to allow for some drainage at the bottom in hopes water won’t rot the bottom of the posts too fast. In went the 6 ft high posts that he got in place using a post leveler and a handy assistant (his dad).
The satisfaction of having all 12 posts in place lasted about a day. We admired from our kitchen window and upon observing the space, Derek decided we should do this thing right and dig up the grass that was going to be inside our vegetable garden. Even though we were planning on raised beds, this would allow us to have a fresh start to this garden surface to have level ground for the raised beds and the walkways between them.
For the garden fence, we used this 48 ft fence on the outside as the main fence and this poultry net on the inside with 12 inches of it at the bottom and 12 on the ground. We do have deer in the area and I know 6 ft of fence is typically suggested so with such a small footprint I hope they are deterred from jumping in. I guess we can always add an extension on top if need be!
No less than 1000 staples were used to hold this garden fence in place. That’s the box size he bought and used almost all of them!
At this angle you can see the poultry netting on the inside bottom which we hope will stop neighborhood bunny from getting in!
Top soil was delivered from a nearby garden center which we added along the edge of the fence, covering the poultry netting on the bottom.
The beds themselves are 5 ft x 3 ft in size made of pine boards. We added cardboard on the bottom layer to help keep in some moisture. I opted for this versus weed cloth as many said that did not drain at all. This cardboard will, of course, break down over time.
More top soil was added to the raised beds and finally some black mulch around the outside on the pathways.
Next steps in our vegetable garden:
- Build a gate. Derek’s going to rig something up using a mixture of our leftover netting supplies, hinges and a latch. We might dig out the entryway a little more to allow for this gate so stay tuned!
- Work on soil composition. I’m sure we need more nutrients in the soil than we got from the garden center. We plan to get a few bags of raised bed soil. Any advice would be appreciated so leave me a comment!
- Build a cucumber trellis.
- Add a fairy garden. The girls are eager to put their spin on this garden space so we are moving over their little fairy garden accessories from elsewhere in the yard to the corners of our vegetable garden.
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