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tobina_gw

Green Doug fir raised beds & plastic lining.

tobina
15 years ago

My know-it-all neighbor has done it again. I've purchased green Doug Fir lumber very inexpensively for an adventurous raised bed project. It has been fun to build, but now he informs me it's going to rot in 2 years.

I purposefully chose not to use cedar because the price of cedar in the PNW was about 10x that of green timber! I fully expect the beds to rot a good deal over time, but I am hoping for at LEAST 5 years before they do so!

Does anyone have any last second ideas to increase the life span on these things and help prove my neighbor wrong? I am still in the construction phase so everything goes.

I have thought about buying some sort of heavy duty plastic (pond-liner stuff?) with which to line the entire interior of the beds, essentially removing the dirt-on-wood contact altogether.

I live quite literally on the former grounds of an old dairy barn and everytime I dig down 2 feet I find old concrete footings about 4" thick and a foot wide, I've thought of using these as footings so the corner posts of the beds sit on concrete, not dirt, and then covering the base of the beds with sawdust or barkdust or whatever I use to line the garden paths in the garden.

What do you all think? Any other brilliant ideas out there? ...or am I doomed to rotted wood in 2 years despite it all? =/ Hope not! =)

Tobin

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