Heather Flanagan

Hi plantthoughts- I was wondering if you went forward with your plan, and if so, how well the aromatic plants did for flea control? I've currently got my apartment covered in diatomaceous earth, and my dog has been flea-free for the past two baths, but I suspect they're still biting him in the yard.

@Michael Cox Excellent points! We'll definitely try to leave things nice for when we move out, and it's good to hear I don't need a 6ft pile to see the benefits of a hugel!

@S Benji Yeah, we definitely weren't going to plant vegetables directly into the soil! Part of the reason I wanted to do raised beds was to get around the possible lead issue (although we are planning to have the soil tested). To fill the hugel/raised bed hybrid, I was planning to take a bunch of brush, soil, and compost from my grandpa's yard in Massachusetts. He had a massive garden for decades but as time has gone on the oak trees in his yard have shaded it out, and brought along with them scores of chipmunks that have eaten up everything he's tried to plant. He still composts faithfully though, so his compost pile is taller than I am!

Since I've lived in New York for the past ten years, I've only ever done container gardening in sub-irrigating planters I've made myself. That's what my shrubs and trees are planted in (bananas, Meyer lemon, Calamondin orange, strawberry guava, pineapple guava, red currant, nannyberries, black huckleberries, an experimental pawpaw just to see if it can be done in a container, etc). My herbs are in commercial sub-irrigating pots from HDPE plastic that were weirdly discounted at Home Depot (I think maybe based on their color?). Oh, and I am doing a screen like you suggested! I'm using arctic and hardy kiwi in one area, and in another I have a few different Phyllostachys bamboo in containers with maypop and other passionflowers running up them. For the raised beds, I was initially thinking of putting chinkapins, hazels, berries, and anything needing protection in them, so that I could easily just hardware-cloth off one area.

Yeah...I'm almost obscenely excited about all of this...

Hi all, thank you so much for your great suggestions! I got derailed on the garden beds after discovering that the best sun on the property is entirely on the driveway, so I've been busy building sub-irrigating planters out of tote bins and five gallon buckets.

But I did keep researching the lumber issue, and I recently found a very interesting solution for this problem: "retired" scaffolding lumber. There's a reuse organization, Build It Green! NYC (http://www.bignyc.org/inventory/item/astoria/scaffolding-lumber) that sells (and donates to local community gardens and non-profits) old scaffolding lumber from the construction projects that are ubiquitous around here. It comes in yellow pine, hemlock, and spruce. It's $1.50 per foot (the boards are generally 10 feet long, 9 inches wide, 2 inches deep, although they'll do cuts for $2 a cut). From everything I've read, scaffolding lumber is untreated and safe to use in gardens. (For NYC dwellers, they have two locations- the Astoria location has much more lumber, but it's pretty remote from the subway. The Gowanus one is one the same block as the Smith and 9th St. stop. Both have onsite parking.)

Another solution is black locust, which would last much longer (possibly decades). But I'd most likely only use it for sub-irrigating planters or something that is definitely portable enough to take with me easily. There seems to be a lot of black locust in the Northeast, and it's considered a fast growing "weed" tree, so it certainly seems like a responsible choice. The only hitch is that because the wood is so hard I think you might need stronger bits and saws to get through it, so I'm thinking that because of the possible time/equipment investment involved I might not want to use it on something that could potentially get left behind whenever we move!

Hi all! I've been reading the forums for a long time but this is my first time posting!

I live in Brooklyn, New York, and I just moved into an apartment with a 12'x20' backyard that the landlord is letting me garden in. Because she's a bit traditional, and aesthetics are important to her, I don't think I can get away with a proper hugelkultur, but I wanted to do a hybrid hugel-raised bed (where the bottom of the bed is filled with branches and cardboard). My question is, what would the most environmentally responsible materials be to build the bed, considering that we're renters and will likely live there for 5ish years?

Cedar is of course the classic raised bed material, but I believe most cedar you can buy comes from the West Coast. Pine is plentiful on the East Coast, and much cheaper, but it rots much more quickly. I'm planning to grow bamboo as a privacy screen, so I thought that maybe I could make the beds out of bamboo and just replace it when it starts to rot with bamboo I'm growing, but I haven't been able to find any bamboo poles that aren't imported from China. (Oh, and I'd love stone or brick, but they would be expensive and difficult to move when we move out.) And then there's 100% HDPE plastic lumber, but even safer plastic seems like it could be questionable.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!