The garden is annoying in that it is not on a hill and yet it is on a slight hill. Not enough to notice and to make a feature of, you wouldn’t even think about it. That is, until you try to do something that is flat, like making a raised beds for vegetables. The ‘railway sleepers’ we used are 20cm tall, on one side of the bed the sleeper sits on the ground while in the opposite side it sites mostly in the ground with just the top showing. It continues to slight slope upwards after that. All very subtle but also a bit annoying when planning things.

What I wanted to do then was to split the bed into two so that it would allow one part to be higher than the other. It would also make it easier to reach things and, importantly, make it easier to cover to stop the cats from pooing all over it.

Not wanting to spend more money that I really had to, and to give a bit of an impression of what it might look like when done, I planned it all out in SketchUp first. This did indeed help, I was able to order one less sleeper by being about to move things about, cut them up, on the computer first. I was also able to determine the amount of offcuts and making it so I had the least number of cuts I would have to make.

All this planning helped a lot, and being able to view the 3D model, flying around it, on my phone meant I had everything I needed while building it in the garden. Re-shaping for the higher raised bed was quite simple, the rotted down horse manure was easy to dig out and put in the new bed. I did spend quite a bit of time digging up the over wintered onions and replanting them higher up. Don’t think they will mind.

A challenge was finding out that the measurements of the new sleepers were 5mm longer and wider than advertised which means there is a small overhang and meant I could not do a quick match between old and new. It was good that I had various offcuts of the old sleepers left over from last year.

Is part of this the amount of bed space is smaller, we are reclaiming some of the grass back from near the cherry tree which gets a lot of sun and was somewhere we sat quite a bit in the first year.

I ran out of time for the day, I’ve got just the lower bed to reconstruct. After that I need to lay the paving between the beds. I am hoping during the week to sow some carrots and beetroot and radish. I also have spring onions in seed trays to plant out and I expect we will have some left over seed potatoes when we plant out the second lot at the plot next weekend. I will too have to build netting to stop the cats too.