Overall the experiment has been a great success.  Our best crops have been the carrots and beetroot, we’ve had a steady supply of fine specimens throughout the summer.  The last squares of these are still in the ground and will likely be dug up this coming weekend.  Still going strong are leeks, chard, kale and turnips.  Lots of warming winter fare to look forward to yet!

With the exception of kale and turnips the biggest disappointments were cauliflower and the broccoli raab.  We managed something but not a lot!  I will try them elsewhere next year.

Disease and pest resistance was excellent in the bed.  Partly, of course, because the soil was fresh and there has been no opportunity for the build up of pests and diseases.  I think to some degree the mixed planting helped also.  I found cabbage fly grubs under just one kale plant, but at least they could not work their way along a row.  Or not unless they developed a fondness for fennel and coriander.  Similarly, carrots showed no sign of attack and possibly this was because they were neighboured by members of the onion family.

One element of success I hadn’t considered when created the square foot garden was the effect it would have on other people.  Everything we do here is fairly visible.  During the summer months, at least, hundreds of dog walkers, ramblers and boaters pass by every day.  Lots of people stop to chat about the garden and remark upon our progress.  Nothing unusual about that, people are always very friendly and talkative (and possibly a little nosey!) around here.  What was slightly more unusual was that they returned bringing friends with them specifically to look at the garden!

I was so pleased that the garden was having a positive impact.  People told me they were a little nervous about starting veg plots but felt inspired to have a go at square foot gardening.  And I think this is because it seems so manageable.

If you are limited by the amount of time you can commit to a plot, this is a great way to do things.  Similarly for those who have little space to spare this is something that could be squeezed into lots of unpromising spaces.  One lady told me she was going to help her elderly mother-in-law, who had been wanting to continue gardening, make something similar.  If you have limited mobility but want to garden, it seems an ideal way go about things.  (Just one word of caution though, we found the middle squares tricky to reach so one or two smaller beds wouuld be better in this situation.)

For the average sized family in the UK, this is a great starting point.  There is plenty to harvest on a regular basis but no gluts to deal with.  Crops are sowed in quick succession, but they are also eaten quickly.  It’s a fairly child friendly approach also as it requires only small spurts of concentrated input at a time.  They can also have fun drawing up plans and making planting choices.

Before making any autumn plantings I will be replenishing the squares with compost. I’ve got to say I’m really looking forward to planting this little patch up next year.

To see where this all began go to our original post on square foot gardening.

In the first instance this line will carry freight from the quarries ‘up bonk’, as one of our farming friends says.  That’s the Peak District to the rest of the world.  The trains will take large blocks of stone down to Bristol for building flood defences.  It will also be used by the local steam railway located about two miles down the track from us.  Not only will we be able to watch narrow boats floating by the front, we will also be treated to steam trains at the back.  We will be wallowing in industrial nostalgia!

There are more ambitious plans to link local towns and villages to the national railway network, not a bad thing as rural dwellers by necessity tend to be very car dependent.  Significantly, this could include the small village of Alton, which thanks to the massive theme park next door is one of the most visited places in Britain.  I’m wondering if I will be able to hop on and off trains hobo style as they chunter past our house?

We too have been busy with our less ambitious, but just as logistically challenging, attempts at bringing our overgrown, sloping garden back into use.  We are now working on the second terrace, which will be used for growing fruit such as raspberries, blackcurrants and strawbs.

I’ve been digging a trench for a drainage pipe because our fine, clay soil is very water retentive and I’m hoping to relieve some of the pressure on the retaining wall.  The pipe was free from a scrapyard, we are also able to get tonnes of bricks for free.  Apparently they are damaged but they are more than adequate for our purposes.  I’m a bit gutted that we had to fork out for the large gravel to go on top, but weighed against what I spend on fruit I guess it will be worthwhile.

Filling this space is going to be challenging.  We will use bricks for some of the infill but for fruit we will really need a good layer of topsoil.  Some of this can be sourced from other areas of the garden, but to minimize buying any in (which is a pain when you have no road access) I’m going to treat the area like an enormous compost heap.  From now until Autumn 2012, which is the earliest we’re likely to plant, I will fill it with layers of organic matter in the manner of Patricia Lanza’s lasagne gardening technique.

I hope you like the bright and cheerful cosmos hedge, which was grown from seed.  I planted it to hide some of the ugliness of the bare sleepers, knowing that no permanent planting could take place yet.  It has proved a real hit with the insect population here, in particular hoverflies.  Speaking of which, here is a picture of one on a thistle that was taken whilst walking on the railway track.  Now a fond memory!

]]> http://sustainablelivingproject.co.uk/garden-and-home/trains-and-drains.html/feed 0 http://sustainablelivingproject.co.uk/garden-and-home/square-foot-gardening-progress-report.html http://sustainablelivingproject.co.uk/garden-and-home/square-foot-gardening-progress-report.html#comments Mon, 11 Jul 2011 11:09:30 +0000 goo http://sustainablelivingproject.co.uk/?p=3842 I thought it was about time I posted a progress report on my square foot gardening efforts.  I’ve certainly been having fun with my mini-vegetable plot and I’ve got to say it looks really pretty – a plus point for those with little space who feel they have to make a choice between an ornamental garden or a vegetable plot.  There are pros and cons to square foot gardening I’ve discovered but on the whole I definitely think it is a great way to encourage people to get growing, especially if they are new to gardening – results are quick and it doesn’t feel like hard work.

I think one of my main worries about gardening in this way, especially now I’ve harvested the first few squares, is the feasibility of crop rotation.  In theory you simply harvest a square and then replace it with something from a different vegetable family. In practice, however, it gets a little more complicated because you have to take into account the different heights of plants so that they don’t shade those at the back of the garden.  And then there are those plants that are not very well behaved and swamp other plants, I avoided courgettes for this reason.   One of my early mistakes was planting turnips in some of the central squares whose abundant foliage has been bullying neighbouring squares of coriander and carrots.  I found myself cutting back the top growth (which is perfectly edible and we have been dropping shredded turnip tops into noodle soups) in order to give the neighbours some peace.  I’ve made my most recent sowings of these in the back corner squares, slightly off-centre so the foliage can spread out over the edges.

That said on the whole the square foot garden is proving to be quite successful.  My worries that the bed would dry out, it is after all sited on top of cobbles and nothing more than a large container, were unfounded.  I have not found myself having to do an undue amount of watering, although prolonged dry spells are rare in this part of the country.   Working on one tiny square at a time means it doesn’t feel very labour intensive.  You can weed one square within minutes, which is just as well because the top soil we dug out of the garden was full of nettle seeds!  You don’t feel rushed with the sowing and so do it very carefully with very little wastage of seed.  Germination rates in the beautifully sifted topsoil have been fantastic, we’ve never had such impeccable rows without gaps!

Square Foot Gardening Spacings:

I haven’t quite perfected my spacings yet and some plants are still maturing so I’ve yet to see whether I’ve got it right or not.  You can easily get 24 radishes in a square foot, we’ve used the long cylindrical French Breakfast variety, they’ve been a real success and we’ve never had such perfectly formed unblemished radishes from our garden!  I’ve put 9 leeks in a square, I had read that you should be able to do 16, but when it came to making the planting holes it just didn’t feel right, so I opted for nine instead, so far so good.  Beetroot, are (roughly!) nine to a square, some maverick strays have been allowed to break the ranks!  Carrots have eventually been thinned down to about 18 plants per square foot, they won’t be enormous carrots but I expect them to be perfect!  I’m still in the process of eating and thinning as you go with the spring onions, so I don’t know what the final spacing of those will be.  Kohl rabi and chard are currently spaced at 4 plants to each square.  The first turnips did well, harvested at golf ball size, at  9 per square so I’ve continued new sowings at that spacing.  Kale and cauliflowers have a square all to themselves.  The fennel will eventually be thinned to one per square also.

Broccoli Raab was one of the new crops I was trying out, I grew about four of these to a square.  The thin spears are absolutely delicious lightly steamed with butter and black pepper but you have to catch them quick before they run to flowers and eat them practically the minute you harvest them.  I don’t know whether they would have been less prone to bolting if I had been more generous with the spacings, but my feeling is just one or two plants wouldn’t provide enough harvest in one go.  So while this is maybe not a contender for the square foot garden I think it is a crop worth persisting with, next year I will be giving these a dedicated patch in the main garden with several successive sowings.

Pests And Disease:

The sifted soil and copper piping running around the edge of the bed has ensured that so far this has been a slug and snail free zone, not a nibble has been taken out of a single plant.  The biggest pest so far has been flea beetles on the broccoli raab, although not enough to cause irreparable damage.  Leaf miner is also evident, in some cases this doesn’t matter too much but they can make for ugly and unusable leaf crops such as chard.  My main fear is they will run rampant through the foliage especially with such close plantings, I’m picking off affected leaves the minute I spot them.   The carrots so far look healthy and green, I guess one advantage of square foot gardening is that it encourages you to try different varieties of a crop in each square, so I have three different types of carrots at various stages at the moment – the hope is that at least some will come through unscathed by carrot fly attacks – time will tell!   As yet nothing has succumbed to disease but it is still relatively early in the season and of course the soil was fresh to start with, again time will tell – I’ll post another report on the square foot garden in late summer.

There have been voices of dissent here at The Sustainable Living Project.  The Man has been complaining about peas.  No I’ve not been hiding them underneath his mattress to disturb his princess like sleep.  He has been complaining for some time now that he never gets peas for his tea.  The truth is, and I’m ashamed to admit it, I don’t really like peas.  My limit of tolerance is for a few floating around in a curry or for adding pretty green colour to paellas and pilaus.

So this year I have relented and decided to grow some peas.  Just a small patch mind you.  Having lovingly raised them in newspaper pots in the cold frame (mice make direct sowings a no-no) I planted my lovely pea green plants out at the end of march.  Within a few weeks they had turned pale and sickly!

Urgent action was required before The Man accused me of sabotaging the pea crop on purpose.  At first I wondered whether the cold had affected them, but they are a hardy, early variety and were planted out just in time for the warm, April weather.  It seemed to me nutritional deficiency was likely.  The peas followed on from a parsnip crop that had been in the ground most of winter.  For that reason this patch of soil did not get the same mulching treatment as the rest of the bed last Autumn.  However, given that legumes are adapted to fix their own nitrogen I didn’t think my peas would complain as much as other crops.  I was wrong!

As soon as my first batch of comfrey fertiliser was ready I gave the peas a jolly good dousing with the stuff.  Within days, the peas had perked up and were looking green again and are now thriving as you can see below.  (I hope you like the eeyore house I made out of willow for them to climb up!)  You will find lots of recipes for comfrey fertiliser on the web, I don’t think any of them are wrong as such – it’s a bit like recipes for bolognese, everyone has their own way of doing things, but I like to keep things as simple as possible.  That way there’s more chance things will actually get done!  So here it is, Sustainable Living’s very simple guide to making comfrey fertiliser.

How To Make Comfrey Fertilizer:

• Take a large bucket or other similar container.

• Stuff your bucket with comfrey until it is half full.  (I use the whole plant, stalks, leaves and flowers if they’ve blossomed.)

• You can chop your leaves up a bit.  I don’t bother and I haven’t noticed any difference!

• Top your bucket up to the top with water and give it a good stir with a stick.

• Cover your bucket.  I’ve used peices of plyboard and old dustbin lids, it doesn’t have to be a tight fit.

• Stir your fertiliser brew every few days.  You may notice it bubbling and frothing at first, you will certainly notice it stinks!  Sometimes it will get covered in a layer of slime where slugs and snails have crawled to their deaths, this won’t effect the fertiliser or harm your crops!

• After two weeks the liquid will be a purply-brown colour and ready to use.  I used to strain the liquid off, but that’s unnecessarily time consuming.  I just dip an enamel jug into the bucket and add this, along with any floating comfrey debris, straight to my watering cans.

• I dilute roughly (very roughly no time to measure stuff out!) one part comfrey fertiliser to four parts water.  I use the solution to water peas and beans and also tomatoes, chillies, squashes and cucumbers when they begin flowering.  Sometimes I use the solution as a general foliar feed for ornamentals such as my box balls.

When the bucket is virtually empty the remaining comfrey sludge is added to the compost heap.  I start a new batch about every four weeks.

My tin is full of my seeds of course, they are nature’s energy stores bursting with potential power.  I’m afraid I know no restraint when it comes to sowing seed, I am a slave to the power of the tin! This lack of restraint, however, does not always make for good crop management.  I end up with gluts and sparse weeks that could be avoided if I was a little more sensible with the sowing.  This year I am determined to do a little better when it comes to successional sowing, especially where fast growing crops like salads are concerned.

I have decided to use this very long thin bed for the salad crops this year.  It is probably the bed that gets the most shade and so is well suited to many salads and if we get a hot summer will deter lettuces from bolting.  It only measures three feet across, so I am restricted to very short rows!  So far you can see I have been very good and the bed has not even been half sown yet.  I’ve been sowing two rows at a time (different types of salad) at roughly ten day intervals.  The idea is that by the time I reach the end of the bed, the crops I sowed first of all at the other end can be lifted and I can start all over again.

There are some flaws in my cunning plan however!  I’m growing different crops and different varieties and some of them regardless of when they were sown will reach maturity earlier than others.  I think also the conditions in which they were sown will have a bearing on how long each row takes to reach maturity.  The earliest sowings of mizuna suffered some slug damage but the dastardly gastropods haven’t nibbled on later sowings.  I’m assuming this is because the various slug predators in our garden have now geared up into action.  I’m always pleased when I spot families of little shrews tumbling out of the dry stone walls.

So even now I realise I’m not going to quite manage a Mexican wave of lettuces!  Nevertheless I shall be very pleased with myself if I manage a continuous supply of healthy salad leaves well into Autumn.  I’ve been eating thinnings in the garden as I work along the rows but this weekend we celebrated our first real bowl of salad.  Now this makes me as contented and as happy as a Hobbit in his hole!

We’ve got loads of sleepers left over so we thought we’d make a raised bed on the cobbles at the front of the house where I’m going to have a go at square foot gardening.  Unlike the rest of the garden this bed will be in full sunlight all day long but is sheltered by the generator room and woodstore.

Square foot gardening is the brainchild of Mel Bartholemew who pioneered this approach to raised bed gardening in the 1970s.  The idea is to intensively raise crops in a bed that is only six inches deep and four foot by four foot.  The bed is marked out in square feet and a different crop is raised in each.

I’m not entirely convinced that square foot gardening represents a revolution in horticultural techniques and suspect it is more of a ‘cute idea’.  The use of a square foot seems a little arbitrary, but it scans, it rolls off the tongue a little more easily than forty-five centimetres by forty-five centimetres gardening – which strikes me as a slightly more sensible idea.  Nevertheless I don’t think square foot gardening is necessarily out of kilter with other organic gardening techniques and so in the name of poetry if not science I’m going to give it a go!  And I’ve got to say like all good poetry it has got me thinking and seeing things in a different light already.

A square foot seems awfully small and my first thoughts turned to veg that was narrow and cylindrical such as leeks, spring onions and carrots.  Most brassicas like a spacing in excess of 45cms but then I thought of the kohl rabi I grew last year.  This was a great success, highly versatile in the kitchen (more so than cabbage) and quick to mature.  Perfect for square feet I reckon and I bet I can get four into each square.  I love sprouting broccoli but that doesn’t only like plenty of space but it takes up space over a long period of time, at least two seasons.  This year in its place I’m going to try something called broccoli ‘raab’, I’ve never grown this or eaten it.  From what I can tell from the packet it yields smaller more loosely formed spears of broccoli flowers.  It doesn’t require anywhere near the same amount of space but more importantly it promises to make the journey from seed to maturity within ten weeks.  Not all of my plans are in place yet, I find that every spare moment I’m drawing grids and filling them in with my imaginary produce!

Berfore planting however, we had to fill our enormous bed with some sort of growing medium.  Our sleepers actually give us double the recommended depth but I’m pretty certain this isn’t a drawback in terms of plant performance.  We wanted to minimize the effort involved in cutting up sleepers up so have just used the full lengths and then one cut in half for the shorter sides.  This actually means my ‘squares’ measure 32.5cm by 34cm.  We don’t have access to Mel’s miracle formula growing medium so we made things up ourselves.  The bed was lined with cardboard, The Man chucked a load of grass clippings in for no other reason than it was expedient at the time and then we emptied out absolutely everything from the compost bins into it.  It was still only a fraction full!  There was nothing for it but to dig.

There has been a strange mound in the back garden ever since we came here. It seemed like a good time to discover what it was.  Helped by my lovely sister-in-law who tells me she misses the hard labour back on her family’s farm in Brazil (really!) we dug up and sieved enough top soil to fill two bulk bags.  We used the chatter and debris (the mound was as I suspected an old rubbish dump) for the much needed infill necessitated by the retaining walls.  The top soil once sieved was lovely, we couldn’t help picking it up as we sieved it and letting it run through our hands.  The mound became a crater.

A Formal Apology To My Dog

Regular readers will know that Willow follows me everywhere and generally gets underfoot in the most inconvenient manner.  I responded to her faithfulness as she peered down at me in the crater by remarking that not only had we got some lovely top soil and some useful infill but that we also had a hole just the right size for a dog’s grave.  This was a terrible thing to say, you have every right to stare at me reproachfully!

Having eventually filled the bed we covered it over as the weather was still very dry and windy.  Perfect conditions for soil erosion, after all that effort I didn’t want to lose a single particle.  Hopefully in the not too distant future I will have finished drawing grids, planted this up and have some nice patchwork pictures of my square foot garden to show you.  (visit the square foot gardening progress report.)

Our garden is beginning to look both beautiful and productive now and I like to think we have gone about creating it from its awkward niche on a north facing slope without disturbing or negatively impacting on the wildlife around us. It is certainly teeming with life – a good sign. All gardeners want their gardens to look beautiful and I think these days the majority of gardeners would be sad to think their little patch of Eden has been created thanks to the destruction of another beautiful habitat – in this case the peat bog.

Peat bogs replenish themselves at a rate of about 1mm per year, the spit of my dainty ladies’ border spade is about 20cm. Two hundred years just to replace a spade’s depth of digging up. Of course, nobody is using anything as dainty as my border spade, peat simply isn’t a sustainable resource. More importantly of course, peat bogs are unique habitats supporting a range of wildlife that is increasingly threatened. Peat bogs also play an important role in carbon storage, dig them up and allow them to dry out and you contribute directly to CO2 emissions.

Amateur gardeners are responsible for 70% of all peat based compost use. Many may not be aware that the multi-purpose composts they buy contain peat or know of the damaging effects of mining peat. And there are also gardeners who can’t imagine living without peat-based composts. Current UK legislation seeks to phase out peat based composts by 2020, so we are all going to have to get used to it.

So what are the alternatives to peat-based composts? Visit any garden centre and there is a good chance you can buy three large bags of peat based multi-purpose compost for a tenner. You could also buy a smaller bag of peat-free compost for five pounds. It doesn’t exactly encourage gardeners to do the right thing. Many gardeners have complained that peat free compost doesn’t perform well and has an unpleasant stringy or lumpy texture or that at the very best the quality is variable. I’ve got to admit my experiences of peat-free have been similar, although I’m pretty certain many variables are at play when it comes to plant performance. And how well do plants have to perform? I usually end up with far more seedlings than I have room for. At the end of the day I grow stuff for fun not for survival, economic or otherwise. Do amateur gardeners need to be this demanding? In truth some peat free composts are better than others – if you are not a fan of peat free composts try Eco-Charlie’s worm-cast enriched peat free compost, it might well convert you.

The best alternative however, is to experiment with making your own potting mixes. Armed with a rake, a soil sieve and a dainty ladies’ border spade I’ve managed to make some fairly good potting mixes using sieved topsoil, leaf mould and garden compost from the bins. Texture wise these feel lovely and haven’t inhibited seed germination. The flip side is they also inevitably contain weed seeds, I haven’t worked out how to get round this yet other than good recognition of seedlings or with unfamiliar crops to sow in straight lines (or at least predictable patterns) so that I can recognise which emerging seedlings are mine!

Despite the promises of rain, it hasn’t done so yet here so I’m off to water my leaf mould cage in the hope of having plenty of material for next year’s potting composts.  How aware is that?

Vegetables, of course, are the demanding princesses of the plant world, they have special needs!  Yesterday while The Man and Goldilocks sought what little shade they could from trees that have barely broken their leaf buds I decided I would find out how less pampered plants were coping and make a list of all the wild flowers I came across - a static snapshot if you like.  I limited myself to those plants only that were in blossom.  So while the cow parsley is about to do its stuff it’s not included here, similarly the colt’s foot is already setting seed and their delicate hooves are now nothing more than fluffy seed heads.  There is lots of lush emerging foliage, meadow sweet, spikes of rosebay willowherb and of course nettles, comfrey, dock and the dreaded Japanese knotweed.  But for the moment it is the turn of the delicate spring flowers.

The blackthorn blossom borne on bare branches is stunning this year and stealing the show in the hedgerow, is this is an indication of heavy fruiting later on?  While nestling in the grass are sunny daisies and patches of  tiny blue speedwell.  In the damp meadow behind the house cuckoo flowers (Lady’s Smock or Cardamine Pratense) grow prettily through the juncus.  Less pretty are the butterburs, but what their flowers lack in beauty their leaves more than make up for later in the year, often growing larger than dustbin lids!

Celandine is always a welcome sight, and I’m clearly not the only one enjoying it.

My absolute favourite spring flower however has to be the wood anemones.  They may grow in fairly dark and damp corners, but they catch the light streaming through trees so beautifully.  I think the flowers have an unsurpassed purity.

Apart from the odd shy violet and a dead nettle here and there, what have I missed out?  Oh these!  Yes, dandelions are absolutety everywhere, these thugs are the hoodies of the wild flower world, striking fear into the hearts of gardeners up and down the land.  But actually they look very pretty when massed together and I didn’t come across a single patch that wasn’t being visited by bees and other insects.  They clearly do serve a useful purpose within local ecosystems, perhaps we need to start reassessing our opinion of them.  Time to hug a hoodie!

There are stacks of magazines guiltily piled under bedside tables, under sofa cushions, in the shed – just about anywhere you care to search in our home you will find gardening magazines.  The piles grow, I never get rid of them or recycle them as suggested by passing them on to my local GP’s surgery.  (In fact after the last outbreak of swine flu they banned waiting room magazines – the last refuge where I could indulge my addiction publicly!) 

Like all addicts I try to justify my addiction, to make it appear like ‘normal behaviour’.  The main justification being something along the lines of, ‘By reading these magazines I will grow better and more bountiful home grown veg, cut down on food miles and save the world!’  Although if I’m completely truthful I don’t just buy gardening magazines about growing vegetables, The English Garden being a case in point.  Its large glossy pages are stuffed with gratuitous images of green loveliness.  I drool over articles on garden design, lust after garden sculptures I will never be able to afford and grand residences with massive gardens owned by ever-so-nice ladies called Jocasta.  Jocasta nearly always has a gardener!  They dedicate one page to eco-issues! 

Even when I am ’on task’ and reading about growing the perfect cauliflower or fan training a pear tree (neither of which I have successfully managed despite my dedication to a gardening publications), I have to be honest, I’ve read it before.  Really there is no excuse for buying any one gardening magazine for more than a run of a year – they all become fairly repetitive and predictable – October issues will wax lyrical over compost heaps, February issues will advise you on pruning and April will nearly always have tomatoes on the cover! 

Free seeds!  That is my other justification for buying gardening magazines, but an issue is way more expensive than a packet of seed.  If I’d just gone out to buy the seed not only would I save money but also I would choose  crops to suit my purposes and varieties which work well for me.  I scored (addict talk see?!) no less than four packets of seeds from a recent issue of Kitchen Garden or was it Grow it?  Things get a little hazy I’m afraid.  Yes, I’ll definitely sow some of them, some I’ll grow into plugs and share, but a good number will end up being sprouted as micro-greens.  It’s an expensive way to grow cress!

Anyway this weekend it is Earth Hour.  Maybe I will consider going cold turkey on the magazines (it’s not until eight-thirty so I can nip to the newsagent before the cut off point?) or maybe, and more likely I’m going to have to come up with a way of off-setting my addiction!  If I plant more trees will it make up for the pile of dead wood under the bedside table?  Perhaps I can reduce paper usage and waste elsewhere in my life – some room for manoeuvre there perhaps!  Seriously, this year I hope wherever you are you will be joining in with Earth Hour.  This year we are being urged to think of ways we can help the planet that will continue beyond the hour – if you’ve got any suggestions for how I can offset my addiction please feel free to leave a comment!

Super beds made from FSC timber, in convenient sizing: 1.2 metres x 1.26 metres by 14.5cm.  Cam be stacked for greater depth. £37.99 per unit.  Guaranteed against rot for ten years.

Made from 100% recycled materials, heat absorbing black panels mean soil warms up quickly. Plants develop quicker and crops are ready earlier. 25cm high and 1m x1m.  Fantastic for growing potatoes in a small space, current price £24.99.

Incredibly sturdy and solid, made from FSC pressure treated planks almost 5cm thick, this generous bed will enable you to grow huge quantities.  30 x 180 x 90cm.  Other sizes available. Price £124.99.

I think these triangular raised beds are just brilliant.  Great for awkward corners or creating great designs.  Made from pressure treated FSC cedar wood for durability, these really are quite superior. From Eco-Charlie £17.75 per unit.

Not strictly a raised bed but a very attractive and affordable large willow planter ideal for growing crops such as beans if you are restricted to patio and balcony gardens.  We love willow here, it is a great sustainable resource.  40cm x 40cm x 50cm tall.  £19.99

To see the full range of raised garden beds and planters available from Crocus, our favourite plant supplier, go HERE.