Garden Bed Transformation

After a few years of gardening without raised garden beds, I finally decided to invest in them and bought 4 Birdies Garden Beds when they were on sale before Christmas 2019. Because my plants were already planted, I had to wait until the spring crops finished before installing them.

Garden Bed 1 was finally cleared last weekend and it was time to install the raised garden bed on Bed 1.

My favourite place to shop for soil is Soilworx, they are non branded, great quality and good value. 

This is the 2.5m long, 55cm wide, 38cm height raised garden bed from Birdies, in Slate Grey:

I felt super awesome when I found out the length of the bed fits nicely along the back fence and the original garden bed length.

Before placing the raised garden bed, I digged out as much existing garden soil as I can to use them in layering the inside of the raised garden bed.

This is what remained of the garden bed as we placed the raised bed in its position. I decided not to fully cover the bottom with cardboard as I don't want to block access of the existing worms and bugs. I just needed to block the grass roots, so I put cardboard on one side of the raised bed.

We used the box of the raised bed as the cardboard:

Now comes the layering. First is the red gum mulch:

Two layers of Garden Soil and Hay each. I used the garden soil that I digged out from the original garden.

And Aquamax Water Saving Mulch from Soilworx.

Another layer of soil, I used Veggie Mix from Soilworx. I originally wanted to use their Garden Soil mix, but they ran out of stock. The Veggie Mix is awesome too, especially because it has mushroom compost in it.

I added plant cuttings from clearing my garden beds yesterday and add in the Aquamax Water Saving Hay on top of it:

Finally, compost from our bin and final top up of the Veggie Mix:

I called back my seed planting master who went on bickie break to commence his job:

We planted Broad Beans, Snow Peas and Shelling Peas, with Rosemary, Chamomile and Parsley as companion plants.

Lastly, Pea Straw Mulch also from Soilworx:

Now, 3 more garden beds to go, just need to wait for the plants to finish producing before doing another Soilworx run to get supply.