"Hip" Urban Gardening Resources?

jtron — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 17:25:07 -0800

Are there any urban gardening resources along the same lines as, say, Make, Craft, or Instructables? Online would be great, but print is cool, too.

For the first time, I have a yard to garden in. While I have a small amount of experience growing herbs on the windowsill and starting plants under lights, I'd like to have a community of some sort to fall back on when I inevitably stumble or have questions. Extra points for communities, websites, or publications oriented toward the young, broke urbanite.

also if anyone has garden center recommendations on the north side of chicago that would be sweet, I know there's gotta be something out there beyond home despot

Constructing Vegetable Beds

schroedinger — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:22:08 -0800

Constructing vegetable beds for a community garden: I have no idea what I'm doing. Can any carpenters out there give me feedback on the designs of our current beds (see more inside), insights into alternative and cheaper-to-construct designs, or point me to resources that will teach me a bit more about carpentry so I can figure this stuff out myself? I'm in the process of getting some new vegetable beds built for a community garden. They're set into the ground, 12'x4'x16'. I'll be using pressure-treated lumber (cedar's way too expensive). There are six beds already in the garden, constructed like this with 2'x4's in the corners as supports. Unfortunately, the weight of the soil has proved to be too much for them and they're now pulling apart at the corners and require reinforcement.

To prevent this from happening again, I'm thinking of building the new beds like this, with center boards to pull the sides together and treated plywood triangles at the edge to provide extra support. But there are still problems:

1) Cutting the plywood will be time-consuming and we probably don't have the tools.
2) The extra materials required make the beds significantly more expensive to build, and we're on a half-a-shoestring budget.
3) Tilling would be more difficult with the bed broken up into three parts.

So, does anyone have any ideas on how to improve the design? Possible alternatives to the plywood corner bracing? Clever tricks that might eliminate the need for the center boards and thus reduce the cost? Experience with building raised vegetable beds? The vegetable beds must all be rectangular raised wooden beds, so mounded beds are out.

Thank you for your help!

Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with communitygardening

"Hip" Urban Gardening Resources?

Constructing Vegetable Beds