As for the raised beds, our garden is just a little plot of ground down below the house. We did use a raised bed for our strawberries, and really goofed it up. We used landscape timbers. It is 8 feet wide and 12 feet long. Now, we find that we cannot weed easily across an 8-foot span without stepping in among the plants. Can’t be done by old timers like us! Mistake! Oh, well, they are gowing good, come back every year, and we get a good crop of delicious berries. Up here we cover them with straw of some kind over the winter. This year we have planted another kind of strawberry on one of the banks and are just going to “let them go” to see what happens!

This is a great thread (gardening) and Dub and Deb do us all a good turn! Not only do they offer sage advice for “Riding Out the Recession”, but it gives readers a chance to trade ideas. Those include both sucesses and failures and we all profit.

Batten the hatches; hard times is a-comin’, folks, and we all need to be as prepared as we can! If you live in a condo and have no ground, learn to grow bean sprouts. They are nutricious and yummy! At least learn to grow a few veggies in containers. Like growing your flowers better? That’s okay; there’s some flowers that you can safely eat or fry the blooms for food. Investigate, learn, and keep reading Dub and Deb!

Have you tried testing the ph levels of your soil? If it’s too acidic, you might want to be adding gypsum or bone meal instead of clay. Corn likes soil on the acidic side (5.5 to 6), but too low, and it can no longer make use of the nitrogen, calcium or potassium.

Might be worth picking up some test kits and see.

Gosh, you have a nice big garden!

*nostalgic sigh*

You take four 2″ x 6″ x 8′ boardsand cut one of them in half. You make a 4′ x 8′ square and fill it with dirt to the top of the board. We used top soil, composted cow manure and grass clippings. Then you take an extra piece of 2 x 6 and use it to level your dirt.

You then mark it off with string for your grid. You have 3 strings going the long way and 8 strings going the short way. You now have 24 squares approximately 1.5′ x 1′. We put in tomatoes, cabbage, herbs, red and green peppers, peas, beans. We took 9 foot furring strips and nailed them to the long side of our box and strung up between them with twine and the pole beans went nuts.

I think we got too ambitious becuase the tomatoes, while they produced, they didn’t produce like they probably could have. so this year we now have a total of 3 grid gardens. The first one is going to have the short crops in it, the next is going to have the medium stuff, and the last one is going to have the tall stuff like tomatoes and beans. We are also going to try to grow cukes and peas on the lattice that you can buy at any lumber yard.

I wish I could put pics in here because it really looked good. Google grid gardening and you should find pics of what it can really look like.

I love this column. Keep up the good work.