Raised Bed Garden Experiment

As we are planning to go off grid eventually, we wanted to have a go at gardening, so I made 2 raised bed gardens in our back yard so we could have a bit of experimentation with various foods.

Shay has decided to go with kale and silver beet in the first garden and it has really taken off, we have not done any companion planting here as there is not much room.  The raised beds are made to fit the chicken run squares over top of them so that we can leave chickens on there to clean it up when we decide to change crops.

I made a couple of different shaped glasshouse coverings from some trimmed wood and plastic.  I am planning to make any raised beds we make in a more permanent residence much bigger, probably the length of 5 squares, but the same width so that we can always use the chooks for cleanup and fertilisation.

we are making our own compost and using everything that is scraped out of the chicken coop each day and all our scraps that the chooks won't eat.  The compost bin needs some work, but it seems to be doing the job it was designed for just fine.  I need to make a lid for it to keep the rats out but before I do that I want to make some kind of protective skirting so they can not dig under it.  We want to keep the compost bin with an open bottom though so that worms can get in and out.

It has been about 4 months and the results are fairly encouraging.

We have been nibbling from this and some of the plants took it pretty hard when we took their glasshouse away but they are getting much stronger now.