Sleepers

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You know I said I was going to renew some of my raised beds? Well, I have decided to experiment with a new style, using sleepers. These are sleepers:

These ones are 2.4 metres long, by 20cm wide, and 10cm tall. Each one weighs 33.5kgs!

They are treated with preservative, but (allegedly) it is not the toxic sort of stuff that used to be used on railway sleepers, so my veggies should be OK.

Currently my plan is to build one double-height bed (with the sleepers standing on their narrow edges – i.e. 40cm tall) and see what it looks like, before committing to making any more. I may decide they are not right, and revert to my former style of bed, edged with 19mm-thick planks. With these sleepers I think I may be able to make something a little bit like the Woodblocx bed, but much cheaper. The plan is to make the bed 2.4 metres long x 1.2 metres wide – mainly because this entails the minimum amount of sawing. Cutting through one of those sleepers with a handsaw may be quite a difficult task!

If I make the new bed(s) that size, it will mean re-arranging the whole layout of my plot, so I will probably get rid of some or all of the paving-stones that currently surround it and form paths between the beds. To be honest, this is also overdue. Some of the paving-stones are about 15 years old and beginning to show their age. A lot of moss and algae grows on them so they do get quite slippery in Winter. They are also difficult and time-consuming to keep clean and tidy. I have bought some more shingle like that which already covers much of the rest of the garden, and this will replace the paving-stones.

This is a tonne (1000kgs) of shingle. The stones have a nominal diameter of 20mm. You can see that it is a pretty good match for the stuff I had laid down about 5 years ago.

This is what the plot looked like a few years ago, with the paving-stones in pristine condition, and the shingle looking new still:

This is the plot in July 2014. Look closely at the paving-stones at the left of the photo. Those are the 15-year-old ones.

So you can see that I am going to be busy. Best to get it done before the main growing-season starts though. If you’re wondering how the wood and shingle got to be where it is, the delivery man put it there for me, lifting it over the garden wall with the crane on the back of his truck. Phew, that saved me a lot of work!

Just want to leave you with an arty photo, showing the tree-rings in the sleepers. Can you work out how old my wood is??

Actually it looks as if some of the wood is a lot older than the rest. The rings on the top-left one are much more closely-packed, aren’t they?

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