The majority of people were going to have wooden boards connected in a rectangle. It would be like a box with no top or bottom. I was at the Pennsylvania Association of Environmental Educators with a few classmates but my dad was there. His back was sore for a whole day. He said they had to construct the boxes, carry it down a hill and place it in the spot. And there were 180 of them, 3 for every plot. Each box was 16 feet by 4 feet. That's 64 sq. ft a box. The height was probably a half foot maybe more. Then we had to fill the 3 boxes with dirt. But even before that we had to pull out the weeds. I had chosen the middle bed with a medium amount of weeds. My mom's bed was really weedy so we covered the bottom in a tarp thing. I believe it was bio degradable but I'm not sure. It might not have been. My dad and I didn't have as many weeds so we opted out on this tarp material. Our community garden is right next to the place where all the leaf compost goes, so there are mounds and huge hills full of compost. We used that to fill our beds, about 12 wheelbarrows per bed. This was hard because the mounds were on the other side from our beds, and up a hill. Unlike other plots we filled our boxes almost to the brim. Then we realized that you can make the bed better for a plant by mixing in peat moss and such sandy fluffy material so that the soil isn't so hard for a plant's roots to breach through. It was about 2 bags to cover 1 box. We had to go to the garden twice that day to fill all the beds. In between the 3 beds there were walkways, which we covered with remaining tarp and wood chips. So by the end of the day there were three filled beds with two walkways, and a thin perimeter which made up our plot.
Here is what a bed of ours looked like.
Here is our walkway half finished next to two of our beds. The string you see on the right was the beginning of my square foot plotting. I already planted in this picture.
Here is part of the community garden with the beds filled.
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