Tales from the Garden: Making a Raised Bed

My wife and I have always dreamed of having our own garden to grow fruits and vegetables in. Living in apartments has always made this challenging, so when we bought our first house we were excited to make this dream a reality.

Because we have a concrete patio, we started small with a few potted plants: a lemon tree, a fig tree, a blueberry plant, and a strawberry plant. The trees were too young to bear fruit, but the berries produced a small, but rewarding bounty.

Early days of the patio

Freshly picked berries

But as summer transitioned to fall, the berry plants went into hibernation and we were left with nothing. We wanted to grow some hearty fall vegetables, so I took on my first DIY project as a homeowner and built a raised bed. Even for someone with a lack of DIY experience, building the bed was straightforward.

I followed this guide from Sunset magazine and made some small modifications. Because the raised bed would be on concrete, I made sure that the height of the bed would be 24 inches instead of 12. This would give us extra room in case we wanted to grow something that had large roots like carrots or beets. In addition, I added some liner on the bottom as well as three inches of rocks to provide drainage.

The project was easy and I was able to do it by myself in an afternoon. A few weeks later, Chelsea ordered some dirt and we filled it up.

Measure twice and then once more with a toddler.

Before we got a wheelbarrow

Finally, it was time to head to the garden store to pick up some starters. We decided to go deep on the brassicas family and bought kale, kohlrabi, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts. We also decided to pick up some celtuce after trying some at China Live in San Francisco. Everything looked great and it was mesmerizing to see how much these crops would grow each day.

An unknown visitor

Tragedy struck one evening. As I was taking out the garbage, I was startled and baffled to see that half our plants were gone. There wasn’t any evidence of them left in the ground and I nearly thought that someone had come in and dug up all our starters.

Of course, the idea of a plant burglar seems rather absurd. Or does it? In any case, I left a security camera trained on our bed to see if I could catch the culprit.

Having seen a squirrel make several visits to the bed, I thought he was our thief and I constructed a barrier to prevent him or any other pest from getting in.

Resilient brussel sprout

Slowly, things started to grow back. It was inspiring to see how resilient the garden was.

That is, until something chewed through the net and began eating our plants again.

At this point, I could rule out the squirrel as I hadn’t seen it in our yard in a long time. Our neighbors told us they got a rat in their garden eating their lettuce and based on some advice I got from others, I felt that this same rat was the one who had been raiding our garden all along.

I desperately tried to patch the net up, but each time I made a repair, I found a new hole.

Nothing was safe in the raised bed. The kohlrabi was gnawed on, the kale was eaten down to the stem, and the broccoli look mangled. Not wanting to eat sloppy seconds from a rat, I raised the white flag.

It was heartbreaking to see something that we worked tirelessly on dismantled by one rat. A few weeks later, our neighbors texted us to let us know that they found the rat dead in their basement. They claimed it was the size of a rabbit. We don’t know how it died, but I can assure you, it was not from starvation.

With the war over and the threat neutralized, we took out our rat-eaten plants and started to think about what to grow in the spring. While discarding the plants, my wife and I decided to leave one Brussel sprout stump in just for fun.

But again, proving its resilience, the stump slowly and surely grew into a stalk.

Dealing with the rat was a pain. we had high hopes for a fall harvest and were left with practically nothing. It would have been easy to give up and that gardening wasn’t for us. But just like the Brussel sprout, sometimes you have to keep trying because you never know what’s going to happen.