Cut-up culverts, waiting for a new life. The culverts before put to use as planting beds. “The culverts are sort of oblong shaped, six-feet at the widest and four-feet tall. Over the years, I’ve considered reusing them as a roof for a building or gazebo or something, or to cut them in half and try to make deer stands out of them. This spring, we had a bunch of trees cut down around the place, including a few big (but dying) maples in front of the barn.  So, with the front area of the barn cleared, the idea of using the culverts as raised bed gardens emerged. 
Our local landscape guy has a small tractor that we used to drag the culverts onto the road and into the open. I asked around about who might be able to cut each of the 15-foot culverts into five, three-foot-tall raised beds.”

“A local contractor came out with a cutting torch and cut them both into five pieces. My landscaper leveled the ground as much as he could, which was a tad difficult because of the size and weight of them. I got a dump truck load of screened topsoil delivered and filled the 10 raised beds with wood from the tree work we’d done previously, mainly stumps and branches. The landscaper then filled them with the screened topsoil.

“I added a bunch of different things to all of them, like mushroom compost, manure, and garden soil, and then we planted them. Three of them have tomatoes (about 6 to 8 plants each), two of them have hundreds and hundreds of different types of radishes, three of them are planted with squash of different varieties, one has cantaloupe, and the tenth one didn’t fit in front of the barn so we put it out by the chicken coop, and it’s planted in prairie flowers.