Raised beds for school gardening club

Hi, can anyone give any advice and help regarding making or buying raised beds for school gardening club. We have very limited funds and would like the cheapest option. Thanks for any suggestions

Reply to
rastable
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There is not single answer to this as it depends on what you can get in your area and how you rate some of the risks. The cheapest option may not be the safest. Many would not use CCA treated pine or creosote treated sleepers where children play. Galvanised iron is also dodgy as it can have sharp edges exposed. Non-treated timber that is durable in contact with the ground is available in some places but it may be expensive. Used material such as concrete blocks may an option, if you only need to go one block high new blocks might be affordable. Try to get some local nursery/builder/ second-hand merchants on side to help.

David

Reply to
David Hare-Scott

Hi,

Some advice on starting raised beds including sourcing materials here .

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Reply to
ciarandeb

'David Hare-Scott[_2_];882418']rastable wrote:-

Hi, can anyone give any advice and help regarding making or buying raised beds for school gardening club. We have very limited funds and would like the cheapest option. Thanks for any suggestions-

There is not single answer to this as it depends on what you can get in your

area and how you rate some of the risks. The cheapest option may not be the

safest. Many would not use CCA treated pine or creosote treated sleepers

where children play. Galvanised iron is also dodgy as it can have sharp

edges exposed. Non-treated timber that is durable in contact with the ground is available in some places but it may be expensive. Used material

such as concrete blocks may an option, if you only need to go one block high

new blocks might be affordable. Try to get some local nursery/builder/

second-hand merchants on side to help.

David

i have two boxes 4' wide by 8' long made out of standard spruce lumber, so

far they have done me well. as david mentioned though a second hand place might be a good idea to look

into--if u have a habitat for humanity restore in your area they might even

donate the lumber to your project or charge u a minimal cost considering its

for a school. good luck. cyaaaaaaa, sockiescat.

Reply to
sockiescat

g'day rastable,

we snipped

Reply to
gardenlen

The above looks like a nascent commercial gardening site with not much to offer.

If you want other forums,try:

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think you are in the best one now, but you might want to look around. Google

Reply to
Billy

Is there a nearby Community Garden area where the club can rent a plot or two? What age level are you dealing with? Is parental help available?

--There's no sense in reinventing the wheel if an established area is available.

--It would save the trouble of dismantling it if they kids lose interest. If the club disbands, you'd still be responsible.

--There might be less chance of vandalism to the garden if it is not on school grounds.

gloria p

Reply to
gloria.p

Could you ask a lumberyard to donate the board feet required to set up the raised beds? They could write it off as a donation, and you could give them publicity by naming the beds after the business. If this works, they might even saw to your measure.

Then you could purchase (or maybe get as a donation), the "spikes" or fasteners for the corners of the beds.

Couldn't hurt to ask! Sell it as a community enrichment project which would give them a positive image in the community.

Just my .02

Reply to
Higgs Boson

Thanks Billy for your interest in my site. I posted a link to a question on my site that has an answer that i thought was appropriate to this discussion. I am sure you researched my site ( organicgreenfingers.com) very well and I am not challenging your assessment of it. I enclose below the story of the site, the philosophy behind it etc. so that other users can make up their own minds. The most important thing is that it not a forum but a place for questions and answers about organic gardening.

Regards, Ciaran.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------=

-- It aint easy being green (but maybe I can help)!

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To paraphrase a certain frog: It aint easy being green. There seems to have been a groundswell of interest in gardening organically in recent years. More people are growing their own vegetables than ever before. This brings the challenges of learning a new area of expertise. I'm trying to make things a bit easier...

Background: My name is Ciaran De Buitlear. I live with my wife and son just North of Balbriggan, in East Meath, Ireland. We moved here in 2001. The garden was pretty standard: six inches of poor topsoil over who- knows-how-much builders rubble. I got the gardening bug shortly afterwards and have been a keen gardener ever since, some might say bordering on the obsessive. I blame my parents really =96 I think all those years of watching =93gardener=92s world=94 as a child on Friday evenings must have sunk in. I had forgotten all about this until I started gardening and started to have some =93flashbacks=94 about it recently!

I'm not trained in horticulture but a keen amateur with a thirst for knowledge and a willingness to give things a go. After 9 years of taking on a project here and there we now have:

=95 A =93designer=94 low maintenance front garden with pebbles over landscape fabric, aluminum edging, a circular lawn and feature plants. =95 A =93high maintenance=94 back garden with wide beds and a multitude of herbaceous perennials, Japanese maples, canna lillies, herbs, hostas, clematis, wall trained fruit trees and a container garden on the deck. =95 A side garden with 100 feet of beech hedge, climbers, native trees, a wild flower meadow and 5 organic fruit and vegetable beds. I started vegetable gardening about 3 years ago and got much more interested last year with the birth of my son Sam who is now 14 months old.

The idea: One lunchtime, I was in a queue in a busy garden supplies shop. There was a mix of people buying things to grow, a lot of them in the fruit and vegetable 'department'. Many seemed to be new to this whole game, a bit nervous and several were asking the knowledgeable owner questions about the seed, bulbs or plants they were buying. Unfortunately the guy didn't have the time to answer properly as there was a big queue and some of the regulars were looking impatient. This got me thinking about how I might be able to help with the questions about gardening that a lot of people have. In the shop the staff member might be busy or not know the answer. The information may not be fresh in your mind when you need it and you can't really bring the guy home with you for future reference! I try to help anyone I know that is interested in gardening but that can only go so far.

The web site: I thought of setting up a web site. First of all what it is not =96 it is not a forum or a discussion group. This has been done and I am not interested in repeating that. The simple idea is that organicgreenfingers.com is a questions and answers site that works. It is about finding the best answer to your questions. The idea is that people can answer each other=92s questions. Of course with so many people starting off in gardening and vegetable growing how can people know when they get a good answer?

I work as an IT consultant and I got the idea of using the format of a web site that I use to get answers for work related questions

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There are a number of features in particular that make it suitable here:

  1. Users can ask and answer questions. You need to register with an e- mail address and password to do this.
  2. Users can vote answers up and down. This means that anyone can judge the quality of an answer by the number of votes it gets.
  3. Users can get reputation points by doing things like answering questions. If you see an answer by a user with high reputation you can judge it may be a good answer.
  4. Users with very high reputation can edit other user=92s answers. This gives the benefits of a WIKI where corrections can be made by senior users etc.
  5. There is good search system and a flexible =93tags cloud=94 type classification so people can find existing questions easily.
  6. When you start to ask a question the system shows you similar ones in case the question you are looking for has already been asked.

Set up since January 2010: I managed to get permission to use this format from the owners and I set up the site. My wife came up with the name and organicgreenfingers.com was born In mid January 2010. I hope to fund the site eventually through some fairly subtle content related advertising but at the moment it is a labor of love! Some of the more popular questions are listed below. See for yourself at

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=95 Doing up my front garden - low maintenance gardening advice =95 How to start Organic Gardening - tips needed =95 Starting cabbage plants from seed - preventing =93bolting=94 =95 Is there a plant that can live without TLC.

Reply to
ciarandeb

My question is why and re-invent the wheel? In rec.gardens, and rec.gardens.edible, there are experienced horticulturalists, arborists, landscapers, and newbies, whose experience may have just endowed them with unique answers (sometimes when we know too much, we limit ourselves by established methods). We have no login IDs or pass words to remember, and when we need a search engine, we have one called "Google". If we want to research an idea, a posting, or a member, we have "Google" newsgroups to repair to. As for earning merit points, I'm afraid it rather smacks of aristocracy, and by and large, we are democrats.

There is no gardening without humility.  Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.  ~Alfred Austin

You are more than welcome to join us, and add to our little corner of knowledge, and bantering, and bickering. We are an equal opportunity group for the wise, and fools, who are not suffered lightly. You just might want to tape up a metaphorical roll of dimes, to steel yourself against the inevitable onslaught, for when you break one of the many, unwritten rules of the group. Then sit back, and enjoy the ebb and flow of the conversations.

Reply to
Billy

Response to billy - Sorry Dave for hijacking this thread. With regard to my site organicgreenfingers.com. I'm not reinventing the wheel. It is a place for questions and answers with methods for people to figure out which answer is a good answer without being an expert on the subject area (if they were they would probably know the answer and not need to ask). I don't seek to replace discussion sites like this (which are fabulous for discussions like this but not great at questions and answers) but to complement them. Finally Surely my site is not like an aristocracy

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haven't you heard of a meritocracy
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Far better than democracy in my view :-) ?

Reply to
ciarandeb

Meritocracy is fine as long as competition is fair, and it is one person, one vote. But, in newsgroups with which I am acquainted, the people with the best information are recognized. No need to put a gold star on them. But it's all good. There are no rules. What works, works Good luck with your site..

Reply to
Billy

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