Concrete Block Raised Beds: A Love Story and Casual How-to

This is the story of how a lover of wild curvaceous vegetable gardens came to appreciate the value of a nice cement garden bed. Mostly it's the story of adapting to the space you have. Actually mostly it's just some pictures of what I did. Here we go.

This is the main part of my garden, my backyard:

At my old house, this was my garden:

You can see earlier posts about that pretty thing here and here. Sigh, I miss it.  

But by the time I got to this house, I had a kid and a husband and we wanted to leave a bit of lawn and more seating and cooking space, and most important, I had to reckon with the fact that all the best sun was on the concrete and paver patio. 

I do have vegetable beds on the South side of the house too (these pics all face West). Some other time I'll tell the story of how I ruthlessly tore out scads of dreary ornamentals to make room for them, and how snow on the mountain and creeping bellflower are my relentless enemies. But for now the point is, there's a lot more shade from trees and other houses to contend with over there, so I had to figure out how to garden over this concrete. 

We moved in late June of 2013 and I did not build until summer of 2014, completing the beds in mid-August. Going two full seasons without a garden to speak of felt like the most patient and mature thing I'd ever done. I really didn't want to wait, but I had a young baby, and a busy job, and I used the time to research and plan. 

I know myself, and I knew I wasn't going to want to spend the money or especially the time to rebuild wooden garden beds every 5-10 years, or really ever again, so I started looking into alternatives. These days I've seen lots of other photos of concrete block beds, but at the time I could only find a few and they were over bare dirt, not more concrete. Still, I found enough information to quell my worries about over-heating, any kind of possible contamination, water drainage and water evaporation, and stability. 

I drew and re-drew a plan on paper, trying to maximize garden bed space while leaving enough room for seating. Then, luckily, I drew and re-drew it on the ground, and walked around as if the beds were there, and realized I needed to trim back my plans a bit to leave comfortable seating space. I tell you every inch of garden bed I gave up caused me such anxiety - but I knew no amount of garden bed will ever be enough, so better to at least have a comfortable spot to sit and look at what we have. 

I made sure to draw all my designs and re-designs in measurements that would work for the blocks I chose - 4x8x16. I decided to cover the beds closest to the house with cedar boards, for looks and possible overflow seating around our picnic table. To keep costs down (wood costs so much more than blocks) on the back bed I just used solid concrete block as the top layer.  While I was planning I picked up a dozen blocks up in my station wagon, to move around and make sure I was imagining how they would fit together correctly in the corners. That ended up costing me some auto repair and quickly dispelled any thoughts I had about getting all the blocks myself to save on delivery costs - ha! They are heavy. So I got a couple pallets of concrete block and cedar boards delivered from Menards to my driveway. 

From there, building was pretty quick. I did the block in one day, and the wood another. The wood planks each have two vertical lengths of 1x1 drilled into them, one at either end, which fit into the holes of the concrete block to prevent getting blown or knocked off.  

 

Once I was done, I ordered a bunch - 5 cubic yards I believe? - of raised garden-bed mix from our local compost and mulch place, Kerns, and I moved all that into the beds wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow. I was younger then, and I don't recall my back hurting as much as it does now from similar activities.

That was 7 years ago. 

(Don't you love how I carefully stage my photos for maximum impact and never leave any random junk lying around?? Some things never change. (It's me - I never change.) Though as you can see, in the intervening years my neighbor got a cat on her garage and my husband built a brick pizza oven. You can see a video about his oven process here.)

This year I slightly extended the back bed along the back fence. I used the opportunity to straighten out a couple of bricks that had shifted out a bit, and there's a few more that need adjusting in the bed closest to the the house, but it's very easy to do and causes no trouble to the plants meanwhile, its just aesthetic. Beyond that these beds have needed no maintenance. I stand on them to harvest my highest beans, I sit on them to rub leaf-miner eggs of the chard while I drink coffee in the mornings, or while hanging out with friends (back when we could, and now that we can once again begin to, do that sort of thing) and I think they are just great.