Raised Garden Beds

I know it doesn’t seem like the time to think of gardening stuff. After all, we just put the garden to bed for the winter and there’s 6” of snow on everything. But if you want a good garden next year, winter is a good time to plan and build your raised beds.

Why raised beds? Why not just dig up a space in your yard and make it your garden? Well….

 

v  You can plant the vegetable closer together than in a row garden. This way, the leaves overlap which conserves moisture and suppresses weeds.

v  It extends your planting and growing season because you can cover the beds with plastic or sheets in case of a light frost.

v  You can create a better growth medium than your native soil.

v  They reduce the amount of water you will use because of drip irrigation, plant density, and fewer weeds.

v  You don’t walk on the raised beds so the soil doesn’t get compacted and the roots can grow easier. Think really big carrots.

v  You get much higher yields from a smaller space than with row gardening.

v  They’re pretty – many gardeners are using raised beds for edible landscaping including yours truly.

v  You don’t have to bend over or kneel as much as row gardening. You can build the beds as high as you need for ease of access.

v  You can use them to control erosion if you build along contour lines on slopes.

v  You can move them, with some work, depending on the changing needs of your garden.

v  Plants can grow up with a trellis like peas, down with root vegetables like carrots, and on the surface like lettuce, all in the same bed.

What’s a raised bed? It’s just a box, built no more than 4 feet wide, which can be any length or shape. You can make them out of wood (untreated), rock, concrete or decorative border material. They can be built as high as it’s convenient but you want them at least 12” deep. You can even raise them off the ground and have sort of a floating garden waist high so there’s no bending at all. Or you can build some window boxes.

We built ours out of untreated red cedar. Walt stained the outside (not on the inside) of the beds in front since they are decorative too. But the ones in back – the main garden – were left plain. You don’t want them more than 4 ft. wide if you can walk on both sides of the bed. That way, you don’t have to reach more than 2 ft. across. If you can only access one side, only build them no more than 2 ½ feet wide, again so you can reach all the way across.

 

Building them is simple. Walt cut the boards to the length we needed – 12 ft. long x 4 feet wide in our main garden beds. There’s nothing fancy about them – they’re just butt-jointed and wood-screwed together and reinforced with L-shaped brackets – three of them in each corner. Then we just had a big wooden box without a top or bottom. Once the boxes are in place, he sunk four 18” pieces of 1 ½” PVC pipe along the long sides and anchored them to the sides of the box with some half-circle brackets. Those hold the trellises. He built five beds for the main garden and three for the front landscaping beds. The front beds don’t have the trellis brackets because we use pretty wrought iron trellises for those.

 

For the other beds, the trellises are also very simple. They’re simply a frame made from 1” PVC pipe. The size of the trellis is dictated by the size of your beds and the height of what you plant. Ours are 12’ long and 6’ tall, with another 18” added to the legs of the trellis to go into the support pipes. They have construction wire (they kind they use in concrete) attached to them with heavy-duty cable ties.

Notice that there is straw between the beds - it keeps the weeds down

Next, you put your box exactly where you want it. Does it have access to water? Is it protected from the wind? Does it have lots and lots of sunshine? We’ve found that the trellises need to go on the north side of the bed, so that the plants get all the south sun. The lengths of our beds run east to west with the trellises on the north to make the most of sunlight.

This faces south

Now you’ve got to fill this bed. You need compost (we’ll talk about that in another blog), peat moss, and some soil – not much. Some people like to add vermiculite. We don’t; vermiculite is nasty stuff, especially for the people who have to mine it. We put a bit of our yard soil in the bottom – enough to cover any weeds or grass that may be under the raised bed. Then we add equal parts of compost and peat moss. Put in enough to at least be level with the top of the bed. It will settle and you want lots of depth for those little veggie roots. Don’t get dirt in the trellis supports.

Turn this over with a shovel, or till with a tiller. We use a Mantis and it does a fabulous job. Make sure all the peat moss is broken up and well tilled.

Now rake it all smooth. Isn’t that pretty? If you’ve built your trellis, put it in the holes.

If you are using drip irrigation (and I really recommend that you do) you can now put your drip irrigation system in place. This way you’ll know where to plant the seeds so they get watered. Each line needs to be about 12” apart and as long as your garden. At one end, we put a valve so we can turn that line on or off as needed. For example, when we pull all the onions or potatoes, we no longer need to water those beds, so we can turn the valve off and conserve water. You are ready to plant!

Right now you’re saying, “Yikes!” or something like that. “All this will cost a lot of money!” Yes, the first year or two is expensive. But after you get things established, the food you get from your garden will more than compensate. Now that we have things set up, I probably spend about $50 on seeds, maybe another $50 on water for the summer, and maybe another $50 on incidentals – a new hand trowel, whatever. We easily make that up whenever I go to the garden and harvest. Plus, the vegetables are fresh, we know where they came from, and we have so many more varieties than the store. Ya gotta eat, right? So you might as well eat something you grew yourself instead of spending your money at the store.

I guess I’d spend my money on the raised bed, then the planting medium – the compost and peat moss – then the irrigation system. You can always hand water if you have to for one year.

We’ll talk later about how to design your garden, but you are now ready to plant a wonderful garden.

Three Sisters and Netafim

Long ago, the Native Americans had gardens. They didn’t have Google to check how to do things; they had generations of experience. And experience taught them that the three staples of their garden – squash, beans and corn – needed to be planted together.

In fact, these three plants have such a close relationship, that they call them Three Sisters. So a few years ago, we decided to try a Three Sisters garden. It was such a success that, each year, we’ve made the garden bigger.

These three plants form a wonderful symbiotic relationship. The corn is the basis because of the calories and food value it provides. It is also a trellis for the beans, but it sucks nitrogen from the soil. The beans are a nitrogen fixer which improves the fertility of the soil for the next year’s planting. Bean vines also help stabilize the corn so they don’t blow over so easily in the wind. Never mind that there were never any Native American tribes that settled in the Cheyenne area – which ought to tell us something. But if they had, the beans would have helped their corn stay partially upright.

The squash is the mulch. I weed and hoe the garden about three times, then the squash vines take over. They keep the weeds down and the soil moisture up. The spines on the squash plants are supposed to keep predators away, but the only predators we had were grasshoppers and they didn’t seem to care if there were spines or not.

We’ve found that squash vines, bean vines, and corn stalks don’t compost well. But they make a dandy bonfire at the end of the season. I’m sure the Native Americans just dug the vines and stalks back into the soil, which was great if you live in the eastern half of the North American continent or in the desert southwest. However, it takes much longer to compost things on the high plains of Wyoming.

More cool stuff: Corn, beans and squash complement each other nutritionally. Corn provides carbohydrates, the dried beans are rich in protein, balancing the lack of amino acids found in corn. Finally, squash has vitamins from the fruit (all those little beta-carotenes) and the oil from the seeds.

The Native Americans did not plant in rows – that’s part of our European OCD heritage – they planted in mounds. They would plant the corn in a mound, let it come up till it’s about 4” or so, weed the garden then plant the beans right next to the corn. Then the squash would go in hills between the corn plants.

I tried the mounds the first few years, and they worked ok. I thought it was too hard to weed and hoe. This year, though, I tried a different way. When Walt tilled the garden, he tilled in straight rows. I planted the corn and beans together in a row. So three corn seeds with three bean seeds, move down the row about 12” and plant more beans and corn. The next row over would be squash or pumpkins. I didn’t plant in hills, just rows. Then, a row of corn/beans, then a row of squash, etc.

I had three varieties of corn – two early sweet corn varieties (which were fabulously yummy!) and the decorative corn.

I did one bean variety – a pretty cranberry colored dried bean.

And I planted squash – acorn, kabocha, butternut and buttercup. The butternut didn’t do as well as the other three. Pumpkins – jack o’lantern, and two kinds of pie pumpkins. They all did great. We planted the zucchini on the edge of the garden after a row of corn. Zucchini always does well. Very, very well.

Next year, I will continue to plant in rows, but I’ll hill the squash and pumpkins in the rows between the corn.

 

To prepare the garden, we till it in the fall to knock down any grass or leftover weeds. In the spring, we till it again, then spread compost all over the bed and lightly till that in. We still don’t have a great irrigation system. I’d love to do Netafim, but I’ve got to save up for that because it’s such a big bed. Instead we had a rotating sprinkler on tall legs. Wastes water and doesn’t get the water where it needs to go – the roots. Next year – Netafim.

I guess this is a good place as any to describe Netafim. This is a drip irrigation system – I found that it was developed in Israel – that is self-draining and self-cleaning. All I know is, it works great. It’s easy to put together for whatever garden you are irrigating. We have raised beds and just-on-the-dirt beds that we use with Netafim. It doesn’t degrade in the sun or cold – we keep it on the gardens year around. Each Netafim garden is on a timer, so I don’t have to haul hoses.

Plants like drip-irrigation. It conserves water, water goes straight to the roots, you don’t get the diseases that watering the leaves can allow, and it helps in windy, dry, poor soil climates. Oh, that’s Cheyenne.

It’s a bit of a search to find a distributer of Netafim, but it’s so worth it. But any kind of drip irrigation works better than a sprinkler.

Back to the Three Sisters bed:  these plants love sun – lots of it. There is one edge of our garden that’s in the shade and the plants come up about 4” and stop. It’s a nice science experiment, but I’ll put spinach or something in that shady area next year.

 

This garden is one of our favorite spots because everything just works together so nicely. And I love pumpkins.