Productive Raised Garden Beds:

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You can get more from your garden now and later (perhaps even during the winter months).

Six Ways to Make Them

by Norm Lee

My wife, Sherrie, and I first built raised beds as a rather desperate means of dealing with a garden site that offered only rocky, dead, chemically abused soil. There was little literature on the subject that we knew of, but we did remember reading that the Chinese have been planting in loosened mounds of earth for 40centuries.

Much to our surprise and excitement, the beds of composted clay soil that we prepared and planted that spring soon produced an abundance of healthy and delicious vegeta bles. Visitors ran for their cameras as soon as they saw our attractive jungle. We won dered how we could have gardened for years without discovering that with a bit of effort we could have doubled, tripled, and quadrupled our yields while halving, thirding, and quartering our garden work.

We saw, too, that we no longer needed to buy or hire a plow, or drag a cultivator, a tiller, or even a common hoe. To dig in raised beds, we needed only four tools: a fork, a rake, a shovel, and a hand trowel-all inexpensive.

THE CAUTIOUS APPROACH

If you're not ready to commit yourself to raised-bed gardening without some evidence that it works, try the following experiment: Mark out one or two plots in your garden (make them about 4' X 8' or 4' X 12') and— using a four-tined garden fork or an iron bar — loosen the soil as deeply as you can drive in the tool. Once that is done, don't step on the loosened soil, or you'll undo some of the good that your hard work accomplished — namely, aerating the soil to overcome the heavy compactness that discourages plant growth. The loosened soil's increased capacity to hold oxygen and water should result in plants that are noticeably bigger, healthier, and more productive.

The worked beds will likely be a few inches higher than the surrounding compacted soil, but they may not be high enough to warrant borders of planks or logs. Then again, you might want to outline them anyway, if only to remind yourself to avoid stepping inside the beds.

Mulch these areas with compost, to add more nutrients and a bit more height. Then go ahead and plant intensively. . . that is, sow the seeds just far enough apart so that when the plants are adult size, their leaves will just barely touch those of their neighbors. This will provide a shade mulch that helps to keep down weeds.

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