Re: [gardeners] Treated wood construction
Margaret Bell (gardeners@globalgarden.com)
Tue, 08 Jun 1999 14:58:27 +1000
Boy, Penny, your sensational rose garden makes the six I planted in my little
garden on Sunday seem pretty pathetic! Tell me, did you keep to a colour
scheme, or are they all different? Mine are white (Pascali), bronze (Just
Joey), and blue (Blue Moon). At least they will be. At the moment they're
just sad little bald sticks.
Margaret Bell
p.s. This is my first post on the list, though I've been reading your stories
for about six weeks now (and feeling just a little jealous about your Nothern
Hemisphere weather! Winter's just started here in Melbourne, Australia).
Can I just tell you what a pleasure it is to read your tales and advice every
day. I think you're all just the nicest people!
penny x stamm wrote:
> When we built our raised rose bed 15 years ago, Jim dug down
> 18 inches, and I scraped the soil with a steel rake to make it
> usable. (My but I was young once....) The bed was 6 x 13.
>
> Jim borrowed a chain saw, and did the very difficult job of sawing
> the 6" x 6" x 10ft treated wood into all the pieces we would need to
> make a containing fence with "log cabin" dovetailing. He fastened
> them together with long nails driven in on an angle -- I think that's
> called 'toe-ing in' -- both inside and out. This was set up to border the
>
> 6 x 13 pit which was ready, using three 6" boards stacked on top of
> each other.
>
> First we placed all the sods that had been removed from the top in
> the first place, upside down in the bottom of the hole. After that we
> moved yards of top soil (which contained a little sand) about 20ft
> from where it had been dumped in the driveway. Interspersed with
> the top soil were two 6 cu.ft. bales of peat moss, broken apart, and the
> original soil raked semi-fine. . We did not have any compost left at all
>
> so that this rose bed contained nothing but top soil, the bit of sand,
> the
> original soil (minus the rocks) and the peat moss. With the hole in the
> ground being 18" deep, and the treated wood fencing also being
> 18" high, we now had a rose bed 36" deep.
>
> Into this 'box' I planted 23 roses, rows of 5 then 4 then 5 then 4 then
> 5.
> It turned out to be WAY too crowded once they had grown in, so I was
> forced to eliminate an entire row, and we now have 18 roses in there.
>
> As soon as the roses were in, I buried 2 old fashioned green spraying
> soaker hoses connected with a siamese valve threaded one starting
> at the back, and one starting at the front, and since my good fairy was
> watching, they just came out perfectly to fit through all the spaces
> between
> the rows of roses, about 2 inches under the surface. Then I topped the
> entire surface with buckwheat hulls, about 2 inches thick. They never
> blow
> around, keep out 100% of all weeds, and keep in the moisture which is
> provided.
>
> The whole construction seems to be indestructable. It gets about
> 8 hours of full sunlight during the summer, and anything from 1 to 18
> snow storms each winter. We painted wood stain preservative on it
> once, after 13 years.
>
> Penny, NY, zone 6
>
> ___________________________________________________________________
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