The Rimu Bed

It might seem that I am sometimes preoccupied with gardening stuff. If you think that this has some truth in it, you’d probably be right.  Today, our second veggie bed gets a bit of the limelight.

In keeping with the idea of naming the beds after native NZ trees,rather than numbering them, we have decided to call it RIMU:  Dacrydium cupressinum, commonly known as Rimu, is a large evergreen coniferous tree endemic to the forests of New Zealand. The former name "red pine" has fallen out of common use.

 
(Above): We excavated a grassed rocky area of 4 metre x 3metre (to give a 5 metre diagonal,so that we could get the boundaries square-ish (actually rectangle-ish,for the purists).This is a photo of the area with the 185x45mm tongue-and-groove retaining timber fixed in place. We excavated down about 300mm and sifted the soil of rocks, pebbles and roots on a 10mm sieve.

 
(Above): Once, the digging and sifting processes were completed, we could carry on with mixing the resultant ”cocoa” with compost  roughly the ratio of 3:1 ratio and back-filling in layers in a ‘lasagne-style’

(Above): The volume measuring was done carefully with 10-litre buckets (100 buckets to the cube) in approximately 50mm layers and inter-mixed by raking,which also helped to keep the total 12m2 area level-ish.

(Above): Once the mixing and filling work was completed, the surface of the bed and the surrounds were made ”pretty”. The bed will be used for sowing in-situ seeds on an experimental first season basis. Beet-root,spinach and leeks were sown in rows across the bed as above, and then watered well. In the picture above, the rest of the sowing must still be done, including some specialised block-sowing of Parsley,Sweet Basil, and the like.

One might query the block fence around the edges. The explanation is in two single words – one word is ‘Labrador’ and the other word is ‘Labrador’.