Raised Bed Gardening

Raised Bed Gardening

My wife has been telling me I should do raised beds in the garden. I don’t think she knows how much work is involved in getting that set up going. I finally decided to do one raised bed to do Strawberries and Asparagus.

I try to get home early enough to spend an hour in the garden every day. Also I usually spend about 2 or three hours on Saturday and Sunday mornings. I can’t always do that and I travel a lot so the raised bed project for the one bed has taken a little over a month. First I marked off exactly where I wanted the bed to be and measured it very carefully. These beds are really permanent.

I ran my tiller through the site for the bed and buried it as deep as I could. Then I laid down a piece of heavy duty plastic and scooped out the loose dirt. That was done 3 times before I got about 1 foot down. The next chore was to build a frame for the bed. You can see it in the picture. The frame extends the bed 6” above the ground. I used the left over boards from a deck that I am tearing off of the back of my house.

On the bottom of the row I put a layer of half-finished compost about 6” deep. I sprinkled this generously with rock phosphate and brought the tiller through the whole row again, digging everything in as deeply as I could. I have a shortage of compost this year (we’ll talk about that in the next blog) . I had to use some mulch that a tree man gave me about 2 years ago for the next layer. It is black and rich and it has earth worms in it; so it must be good.

A caution about fresh wood mulch. It will suck the nitrogen out of the soil. Not taking any chances, I gave it a dusting of 10-10-10. Ok so I’m not purely organic. I alternated layers of this stuff and the dirt that I had scooped out of the bed until I filled the whole frame. I ran out of time, there is still a little bit of dirt to put into the bed. I’ll do that next week and the bed will be ready for strawberries and asparagus. I may put a layer of mulch on the top to protect the earthworms until time to plant.

I think one raised bed will do me for now.

David Segrest practices international real estate and writes an international real estate blog. Email is david@segrestrealty.com , Web page http://www.segrestrealty.com ,Blog http://dointernationalrealestate.blogspot.com/