The building is underway at the Sutherland Schoolyard Market Garden! Two days in, the site had been mulched with coconut coir from mattress recycling and woodchips, the bed design has been settled, and while we awaited our delivery of wood, a team of volunteers tidied the site, and marked out the position of the beds with string, measuring tapes, flags, and a dose of head-scratching, trigonometry, and humour!
Once the wood arrived, bed construction could begin in earnest. The amazing yellow cedar we are using to build the beds is much harder than red cedar, so is proving difficult to hammer together – as such we’ve switched to screws. Yellow cedar is more rot-resistant than red, and with the dimensions of this wood, our boxes should last many years.
The beds are constructed of 3 overlapping “rings” of 2.5×6′ boards, secured together by 2×4 corner and centre posts (the latter which are sharpened and hammered into the ground to prevent bowing once filled with soil.
A layer of landscape fabric to act as a root and weed barrier gets stapled inside, and then the boxes are filled with beautiful, fertile soil (60 yards courtesy of Harvest Power, and the remaining 160+ yards from EcoSoil).
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As of March 11th, 14 beds had been built and 12 filled. Way to go team! Big thanks to all the volunteers who have helped out to date. We’ll post another update again soon, but for more photos, check out our flickr album on a regular basis.
We hope to see you on-site! To see dates and times and to sign up for workbees, click here.