Raised Beds (Part 1)
This past weekend I started on a project that has been years in the making. I've always been a traditional, victory-style gardener using a large plot with straight rows for all of my crops. However, since moving from the farm where I grew up to a smaller lot a few years ago, my wife and I have developed a bit of a long-term plan for our property. When we purchased it, it was a 1.5 acre blank slate without any landscaping. We plan on transforming it into a productive oasis for both us and the local wildlife.
Buckwheat blooming in the meadow.
If you follow Bob's LIVE, our weekly show on Facebook and YouTube, you have seen my efforts to slowly transform the lower end of our property into a meadow garden. Though it is still in its early stages, this project has been a success, attracting birds, pollinators, and other wildlife to the area. Among the visitors are rabbits who also like to stop by the vegetable garden for a quick snack. My current garden with easy to reach rows at ground level wasn't going to cut it. Also, the existing garden plot was huge! At 30 x 100 feet, it was extremely time consuming to plant, weed, harvest, and preserve that much produce. We're still eating beans we canned the first year we lived here!
This pushed me toward the idea of raised beds with a nice picket fence around it. Raised beds would allow me to grow in a smaller space, reduce the amount of weeding I need to do, and the fence would provide protection from the local wildlife. Eventually, I settled on six 4 x 8 foot beds in a fenced garden of approximately 20 x 30 feet.
This spring I have mainly been preparing for this project and buying supplies. Luckily, we bought the lumber for the beds before the cost of wood became insane. I also needed weed cloth for the area around the beds and a source for bulk mulch and top soil. I needed to prepare the area and also tackle an invasive species, Johnson Grass, that I have been battling in my garden for years.
I started off by tilling and smoothing out the area early this spring. Then I waited for the Johnson Grass to sprout. Then it was a matter of mowing it down and treating the affected areas with glyphosate herbicide. Glyphosate has got some bad press recently, but it is literally the only thing that will kill Johnson Grass. Even then, it took multiple application to fully eliminate it. Finally, I wanted to wait for the glyphosate to decompose before proceeding. (The treated area should never come in contact with crops in the new raised beds, but I wanted to be sure I had given it time to break down before covering the area with weed cloth.)
This last weekend I finally put down the weed cloth where my new raised bed garden will be located. Normally, I'm not a fan of weed cloth in landscapes, but it works in this particular use case by acting to prevent weeds from growing between the beds. I dislike it in flower beds because flower and shrub roots tend to grow into the nearby weed cloth creating a matted mess. In this case, there will never be plants near the cloth itself.
Follow along as I continue this project throughout the summer and into the winter. This fall, I hope to be at a point where I can build the fence around the garden so it can age before painting next spring. We might even be able to plant some fall crops! Check out video of the ground cloth installation below. You can also follow this project and other news from Bob's Market on Bob's LIVE every Tuesday at 5 PM.