Fight Board-om: Plant a Raised Bed!

Looking for a way to grow more of your own produce a home? Raised bed gardening gives you superior control over soil quality and helps avoid burrowing pests. For nearly any size garden, building beds creates a more attractive, more productive, lower-maintenance, semi-permanent installation.

The problem is materials.

Pine rots too quickly. Oak, hickory and similar are expensive, heavy and hard to find in quantity. Pressure-treated wood is out because it can leach harmful chemicals into your growing soil. The best option is cedar, which combines light weight with exceptional rot resistance. Around here, though, cedar costs an arm, a leg and a few miscellaneous bits you'd probably rather not part with ($30 or more for a 8' 2x6 board!).

So a few of us are planning to get together to order northern white cedar dimensional lumber from Portage Mills in Maine (rough-sawn 2x6 boards, one good face, ideal for raised beds). Portage is a local business, family-owned and operated for about 50 years near the Canadian border. They produce lumber from trees harvested by professional loggers using sustainable logging practices. By buying in bulk direct from the mill and having the wood freighted to us, we can save a good deal of money. We get a further savings by having the lumber shipped to a business, rather than a home, and the Bradfords have agreed to be our drop point for delivery.

Our final price will depend on how many feet of lumber we end up ordering, so the more folks we have going in together, the more lumber we can order and the more broadly we can defray the freight charges. If you're interested in being a part of the order, please contact Christy Shi or Brian Little by Friday, March 21st. You'll need to be able to pick up your order from the Bradford farm within a couple of days of delivery, and payment will be required up front.

Let's get gardening!