Keeping with the raised bed theme this week, Eric of GardenFork just did a video about redoing some basic raised beds. In the video he covers the different types of angle brackets you can use to reinforce the sides as well as touching on the treated vs. untreated lumber debate. Plus there’s lots of labrador action (and non-action).
Author: Mr. Homegrown
How to Make a Hexagonal Raised Bed
Materials
You will need six 6-foot pieces of 2×6 lumber. I would suggest pressure treated lumber. I chose the dimensions for these beds to make them as big as they could be and still be able to comfortably reach into the middle of the bed. These dimensions will also minimize waste (since we’ll be using 6′ lumber).
Tools
This project requires a compound miter saw, a tool on my list of recommended homestead accessories. Mine has gotten a lot of use over the years for everything from gardening projects to building furniture.
The angle at the corners of a hexagon are 60º. Therefore, you will need to set your saw to 30º (90º-60º=30º).
With the saw set, you just need to cut 12 sections, each 2’6″ long, with that 30º angle at each end. Secure the pieces together with screws at the corners.
Although I did not do this I would recommend reinforcing the bed by screwing a 2×4 in the center as above.
If you have a table saw (which I did not have when I built my beds) you could reinforce the corners with another 2×4 ripped at an angle. My beds did fine without this step. You could also make these beds taller if you need to by adding more courses of lumber. And if you’re the welding type, these beds would be very handsome (though expensive) if done in metal.
Pros and Cons
While I was pleased with aesthetics of my hexagonal beds they no longer grace our backyard. The area in which they resided became too shady to grow vegetables in and also became the strip mine that supplied the clay for our adobe oven. Our landscaper has proposed making this part of our yard a rain garden. More on that project later in the year.
One disadvantage of beds with this odd shape is that they are harder to critter-proof. I don’t consider this a deal killer, but it’s something to think about if you have the hoards of marauding mammals that nightly assault our backyard even in this very urban part of Los Angeles. You can see in the first picture that I ended up creating a sort of bamboo teepee to provide support for beans and tomatoes and on which to attach bird netting (which the marauding mammals easily breeched).
I’ve posted about the pros and cons of raised beds in the past. Unless you have a compelling reason to build raised beds I think it’s always better to grow in the ground. That said, these hexagonal beds look really nice and I would make them again if I lived somewhere with less mammalian interference.
Saturday Tweets: Tanning Fish, Trees and Dealing with Medieval Mansplainers
What makes a designed plant community different? (And why does it matter?) Thomas Rainer and Claudia West, authors of Planting in a Post-Wild World, have the answers: https://t.co/gLmaXxkUj9 pic.twitter.com/eVfGX7RMdy
— Timber Press (@timberpress) April 27, 2018
Here’s my PSA to everyone with cats & kids. The other night our cat ate one of these ubiquitous Nerf darts. The x-ray image shows how the tip got lodged at his duodenum, the entrance to the small intestine. He would have died without (expensive) surgery. These darts kill cats. pic.twitter.com/2v2VlsRKIk
— Krista O'Reilly (@krista_oreilly) April 26, 2018
[TUTORIAL] How to: Tan Fish Skins>> https://t.co/EB6ymBitEW #survival #bushcraft #primitiveTechnology #wildCraft #SHTF #prepper #tanning #fishing #Inuit #salmon #Alaska
— TheUrbanAboriginal (@TheUrbanAbo) April 27, 2018
A study shows Seattle's poorest neighborhoods have less than one-fifth the tree canopy of the city's wealthier areas. https://t.co/MxHaIbBI3N
— Thomas Rainer (@ThomasRainerDC) April 26, 2018
When you want a small base for a $26 LED light and things get out of control. The classic posable desk lamp design is really fun to make out of plywood. Thanks for the idea @donttrythis!#whatmadethis pic.twitter.com/hyBqAhG59r
— federico tobon (@wolfCatWorkshop) April 24, 2018
"We give up our public space, our neighbor-to-neighbor conversations and ultimately our personal mobility for the next car, and the next one." https://t.co/YDoXLeEle7
— Streetsblog USA (@StreetsblogUSA) April 25, 2018
All we need to do to fix transit in this country is build exact replicas of these bus stops from my daughter’s Lego set pic.twitter.com/u4VbqqG91T
— Alissa Walker (@awalkerinLA) April 25, 2018
California's Trees Are Dying At A Catastrophic Rate https://t.co/yDizIMeYyu
— Thomas Rainer (@ThomasRainerDC) April 23, 2018
How to deal with a mansplainer – four medieval ways. pic.twitter.com/GUMDAGbWFr
— Damien Kempf (@DamienKempf) April 25, 2018
Reading my timeline
[Jacopo Bassano, 1538] pic.twitter.com/LCxHVd1qM2— Damien Kempf (@DamienKempf) April 25, 2018
Does Facebook Actually Work for Promoting a Small Business or Non-Profit?
One last comment on Facebook and then we’ll move on to more pressing problems like growing tomatoes and keeping the squirrels off the peaches. My favorite podcaster, who goes by the initials KMO, interviewed contrarian journalist and advertising consultant B.J. Mendelson for episode 524 of the C-Realm podcast. In the interview Mendelson addresses one of the concerns that many of us face in our relationship with Facebook, namely that we have to be on it in order to promote our business or non-profit. Mendelson reminds us that Facebook is selling an advertising medium and that Mark Zuckerberg and other social media moguls might just be exaggerating its actual effectiveness.
Any of you who administrate a Facebook page for a business or non-profit will know that unless you pay, Facebook’s algorithm will bury your posts. Some other points Mendelson makes in the interview:
- A 1% click through rate on a paid post is often as good as it gets.
- Eighty percent of Facebook users are outside of the U.S. If you’re a local business, like say a plant nursery, what good is paying to reach someone in Latvia?
- Bots equal 60% of internet traffic (something to think about when looking at your stats).
- What happens if you rely on Facebook as a platform for your business and, like so many other internet companies of the past, Facebook goes out of business?
To illustrate how social media companies exaggerate their advertising power Mendelson offers a personal example. He has 700,000 Twitter followers. When he sent out a tweet about his new book he sold, not hundreds or thousands of copies, but exactly 28. A tweet to his 700,000 Twitter followers asking for a donation to a breast cancer charity netted just $1. While acknowledging that social media can, occasionally, be an effective advertising medium, for most of us it’s probably a big waste of time.
If you listen to the end of KMO’s interview you’ll get a code to download a free copy of Mendelson’s book, Social Media is Bullshit.
117 Raw Milk with David Gumpert
On this episode of the podcast (much delated due to home construction projects) we talk to journalist and author David Gumpert about the controversies surrounding raw milk. David was a staff reporter with The Wall Street Journal and a small business editor of the Harvard Business Review. He was also a senior editor of Inc. David is the author of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Food Rights, The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind Americas Emerging Battle Over Food Rights and the Raw Milk Answer Book. You can find his blog and sign up for his newsletter at The Complete Patient. One of the things that comes up in the conversation is the dairy episode of the Netflix documentary Rotten. David posted a review of that episode on his blog.
If you’d like to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to [email protected]. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store and on Stitcher. Closing theme music by Dr. Frankenstein. A downloadable version of this podcast is here.