canadanna said:Like the pictures and step by step and especially the comment on taking time to fill them up. Well done!

Thanks!

greene said:@virginiarose You are more than welcome to come to my house, bring your tools, and do the work if you want to help something decompose quickly. If you do come, I can pay you in lemonade and cookies.

I planned on going with the easier method of building a raised bed similar to what @fiwit showed us and I will completely ignore the tree trunk for the rest of my natural life.

Well @greene It sounds like you are just looking to cover your dead tree. I cannot do that around here it will attract termites. I just want to plant flowers and you should have your own tools by now......What kind of cookies?

Let's ask @fiwit since this is her thread.

well, Susan's profile says "chocolate sings," so it sounds to me like it would need to be some kind of chocolate cookies... and now I'm hungry for cookies. Thanks, ladies!

yummy!!

Double chocolate chip chunk

I like chocolate covered graham crackers!

It's a good thing I just had an Almond Joy candy bar, or I'd be hungry for some chocolate right now.

Well, I just ran out of Chocolate Covered Cherries. I really do need some of those double chocolate chip chunks so I can bake some cookies!!

Don't get me started on those chocolate cover graham crackers.


Trish will probably split this thread and call the second half 'Chocolate Drool'!

Fiwit: great beds! They look really good. And I bet landscape timbers last a long time in contact with soil. How thick are they? I guess less than 4".

They might stay drier and last longer if you line the insides of the bed walls with heavy plastic film below soil level. For example, the bags that the soil came in. That may be worth doing if you find that the edges and corners dry out faster than you like.

i love the policy of "holds yard waste this year, hugelculture foundation the next few years, soil after that". If you ever let a bed lie fallow, for example to deplete the weed seed bank in the soil by growing a few biomass cover crops, you could harvest the top growth to give a new bed a head start.

Thanks very much for the tutorial! The photos make it a very easy read, and you've got me thinking about pricing landscape timbers.

>> I paid a neighbor to cut down a cypress tree and the trunk is lying on the ground.
>> Instead of paying someone to cut up the tree trunk into manageable pieces
>> I will build a raised bed around it - right there where it lies. Ta-da!

>> I believe cypress trees are pretty rot resistant.

>> I was thinking of a long horizontal planter while you waited for it to decompose.


>> I will completely ignore the tree trunk for the rest of my natural life.

Awww! I was thinking that it could be one wall of a long, narrow raised bed, eliminating the effort of hauling half of the timbers.

Or if a few hundred ATP members all showed up on the same afternoon, we could saw that trunk in half and drag the other half to run parallel to the first half, 3-4 feet away. Now it would form BOTH long edges of the bed.

But I bet you would run out of cookies!

When I make RBs, most of the work and expense is in making the soil from almost-pure clay.

Great idea! Love the long horizontal planter idea! She does need to bake a lot of cookies.

Rick, putting plastic anywhere near my beds would kind of defeat the purpose of having a natural environment, ya know? I've got one bed that I made in summer 2008, and haven't noticed any issues with it. But I live near ATL, so we don't tend to have issues with dryness here.

The original owners had a raised bed in the back yard. They built the house in 1987 or thereabouts. The landscape timbers rotted out sometime in the last couple years. I think I'm safe.

>> Rick, putting plastic anywhere near my beds would kind of defeat the purpose of having a natural environment, ya know?

True. Fortunately, drying out too fast isn't an issue for you. Is ATL Atlanta?


Ahh, they last 20-25 years. Good for all practical purposes.

I was wondering because my SO and I wanted to buy a manufactured home part way up a steep hill. It had a view like the Lord of the Manor! And it had a lot of plantings in the front yard (steep) and back yard (very steep, extending up higher than the roof of the house). The plantings even had a smart drip/spray irrigation system set up with mainlines and feeders. I WANTED those gardens even if my ankles would have suffered and given out.

It was all terraced with many landscape timbers, each with one side fully buried. Like a series of shallow steps or very shallow terraces.

I'm sure from the looks of the manufactured home that they had all been in the ground 25-30 years. Surrounded closely by forest, there was probably no shortage of termites and wood-eating fungus. I don't know how (or if) they protected landscape timbers 20-30 years ago.

Anyway, after the inspector pointed out how the deck and ? skirting ? were rotting, and the leaks and mildew indoors, he explained that we would have to re-engineer the whole slope, unless we wanted the back yard in the living room.

THAT was a case (unlike raised beds), where a 20-year solution was a short-sighted stopgap measure.

We had to give up the view, and I had to give up the gardens. But my ankles will live to walk another day.

Yes, ATL is atlanta -- I get lazy.

I hope to someday face all the beds with some type of stone, but when I can get landscape timbers for $1 each at the annual sale, stone has to wait. That said, landscape timbers are typically pressure-treated, so you wouldn't want to use them for a veggie bed.

>> I can get landscape timbers for $1 each at the annual sale

Oh, DROOL! At 8' long and 3" tall, that's half the price of my 8x16 or 12x12" paver for an 8" or 12" tall wall. And they sure look tidier.

I guess mine are handier for tiny beds and weird shapes. And nothing could be as easy to "install" (i.e., drop in place and lean against a pile of soil).

Just so you know I am not ignoring you all. I have been making jelly.
And surprise, surprise the 'Yard Police' came through the neighborhood to tell everyone that their yards are not clean enough. No cookie baking for me this weekend! I'll be eating the Almond Joy with morning coffee!