I'd like to share my raised bed design. In common with many others in Alaska, my property has several decades of "treasures" lying around. It's always a great feeling to be able finally to make use of some of them and solve a problem.

My problem: it's cold up here. Growing season is very very short.

My treasure: a number of cat tracks. One from a dozer, and two from a very large excavator.

Extracting them from the trees growing through them in the pit they were buried was a hellacious task; it took every bit of grunt from my SuperDuty PowerSTroke Turbocharged Intercooled 215hp/500lb-ft torque Mud-tired truck to get just the "little" bulldozer track out and into my garden. The big tracks called for the JD644 loader and use of DoT cables.

Anyway, I hauled them into the garden, and set them up vertically. Each of the three is slightly different, the set-up I prefer is inside-out and oval. That is, bend the track the opposite way in which it is placed on the dozer, etc. Massive applications of shale bars, pulling on ends with come-along and/or truck, etc., and you can make the two ends meet. They 'close' better if inside out, as above. I created the first in a near-circular shape, to maximize area, but that made it too large to reach the middle of the garden easily. An oval is better, and I oriented the long axis parallel to the sun's summer traverse, for maximum effect.

I filled space with bales of extremely old hay. After letting those settle a while, I then piled in organic material of all kind - just as with any raised bed. My own secret weapon here was the use of twenty-five years' worth of horse manure - long dried out (from the barn), or composted (if outside). Not as rich as cow manure or others, but infinitely prefereable to the river cobbles that are our natural "soil" here.

Does all that iron ever work! Its dark color and tremendous mass absorbs sunlight terrifically, and its high thermal conductivity passes the heat quickly to the enclosed soil.

These beds are never about to shift or crumble. They'll still be here a few weeks after Armageddon, unless someone even crazier than I purposely yanks them out.

-- Audie (paxtours@alaska.net), December 14, 2001

Answers

Audie, where in Alaska are you located. I am in the Matanuska Valley and it seems there is no end to the inventions we all come up with to raise a garden. You win, however, useing left over treasures from the past, a good idea it sounds like. Maureen at Ravens Roost in Palmer

-- Maureen Stevenson (maureen@mtaonline.net), December 20, 2001.