Yesterday and today, the first of six raised beds has been built. They will be lined at the bottom with wire mesh to keep out the burrowing rodentia. They are lined on the sides to keep the wood from leaching chemicals into our food. On top of the wire mesh are radiant flooring heating tubing which will heat the beds in the winter. The tubing will be filled with polypropylene glycol (PPG) that circulates into a heat exchange manifold associated with the biomass generator/boiler.

Here is the raised bed from our back door.

Here is the raised bed from slightly above.

You can see a closer shot of the interior here.

A really close up shot of the tubing and how it is tied down.

What it looks like if you were laying down inside (as if!)

We are having to bring in fill to create a level surface in our backyard for the raised beds. We learned that this fill, which is palm sized smooth rocks and black earth, is the scrape from a nearby dairy farm that has been sold and is being torn down for a subdivision. Crimes!We will benefit from this because this fill has loads of cow manure and, oddly enough, cow bones (think calcium). The story is that when a cow has passed away, the farmer takes the carcass out into the pasture and lets nature re-assimilate it. The bones we come across look pretty old and moldy, well taken care of by the elements.

We may have the greenest yard/garden for miles.

The truck is seen here, backing up our driveway and up past our house and hopefully missing the wellhead.

As seen from inside the house, truck makes the house look small. Notice our grill. We are very low tech. It would be awesome to have a deck that wraps around our house and in the backyard. It would be awesome to have a gas grill or just a much more butch charcoal one. We tend to be utilitarian so we do not have those sorta of amenities.

The truck is tearing up the side yard. It will come through here some 8 times today to get the amount of fill we need.

Dumping the fill.