Our Raised Bed Garden

Hello everyone! I’d like to think each and every one of you guys for stopping back in and visiting with us! As you know, this is the Coverin’ the Bases section of Ridin’ Out the Recession with Dub and Deb in Miz Judi’s Kitchen.

Man, when we added Coverin’ the Bases, that sure become a mouthful! Whew! It’s great to be here today with you.

Well yesterday we worked on our raised bed garden. As we’ve said earlier these types of garden beds can be any size you need for your situation.

Depending on your lot size, or your personal preference, the beds can be increased or decreased, or moved fairly easily from what I’m seeing in regards to our experience yesterday.

Our Raised Bed Garden:

I started out going to do, two, a 4’x4’, then an 8’x8’. After looking at it for a bit, I decided that we’d do one, and we’ve ended up going to one bed, that being 8’x24’.

First we had the room, but I have to tell you most backyards even in subdivisions, will sustain this size bed with plenty of room to spare. Secondly, we used cross-ties and by going this size with it, it actually saved us from having to cut the cross-tie’s size down. Plus by using the full cross-ties, it saved us a little lumber.

Another thing I noticed while doing this, is the fact that with just a little work, these can be very attractive landscape additions to a yard. I personally enjoy seeing wooden landscapes scattered throughout a backyard, and the more this was coming along, I gotta say, the better I liked the idea of these raised bed gardens.

I don’t see personally where anyone would feel such as this would “take away” from the attractiveness at all from your backyard beauty. But, everyone is different, and honestly that’s just my opinion, for what it’s worth.

Something else I’ve seen right off the bat, is the care factor involved in this type of garden is going to be much easier than our larger, more typical what I call, an “old style garden.” This being just a spot you’ve picked out (ours being a 50’x100’), tilled up, rows laid out, seeds planted, and growing the crops off.

We spend much time out in this type of garden pulling weeds. We do have a very small tiller that will go between the rows to get the grass, and it “aerates” the soil as well. We still though get on our hands and knees to catch the grass around the plants the tiller doesn’t get.

Fertilizing is a fairly labor intensive job, on account of trying to keep it off the leaves of your plants and burning them. But, from the manure, hay, and other things we try to keep putting into the soil, hopefully this will come to an end. Maybe it won’t, I’m not sure on this yet, but hopefully it will. I only have to fertilize my spring garden, and my fall garden once each, so it’s not that big of a deal.

Water also is a chore in our case, on account of we use only a back and forth lawn sprinkler and we water in early morning and late afternoon. As soon as the day starts heating up, we shut the water down to avoid so much evaporation.

Even though our old style garden is a 50’x100’, once again, it takes 3 days to get across it. When watering, especially with any type of sprinkler, make sure you give your plants a good, soaking drink, this is important.

Now, from what I’m already seeing from our raised bed garden, and remember we’ve not had one before, it has some very appealing factors I’m already noticing…but I’m not gonna tell you what they are! Ha!

A Couple Tips…from a “lazy redneck”:

First off, I see the care of a raised bed garden is actually going to be fairly simple. Weed control can be done fairly easily, if you keep your garden width from 8’ or below. This enables you to pretty much reach from the outside of your beds into your garden without having to literally get into the garden.

Also, by your garden being in a “raised bed,” you won’t be bending over quite so far while weeding. I like that!

Another thing, and you guys can thank our good friend from North Carolina, Bonnie for this tip, but I might just take credit for it anyway, is mulch. After your plants are set, though I wait a week or two, that’s just me personally because I feel it lets the plants get over the “shock” of being replanted, mulch all around your plants. This keeps the weed problem to a minimum.

Bonnie actually says they’ve reached the point of their entire garden being planted in mulch, and weeds are a very minor problem anymore. Now Bonnie, if I’m misstating anywhere here, just “chime in,” and let me know and we’ll get it corrected. If I don’t, it’s only because I wanted to aggravate you! LOL!

This has other pluses as well. In regards to fertilizing, this will be much easier as the plants aren’t so close together, again, you can pretty much reach them all from outside your garden area. I like to use Miracle-Grow on my garden, but in the larger garden we have, it wouldn’t be cost efficient.

Also, we really couldn’t drag a hose around to Miracle-Grow it, without messing up many of the plants.

I do supplement the Miracle-Grow once in a while with a commercial fertilizer on my tomato plants. Again, as we continue our composting, we hope to do away with the fertilizer program. Whether this ever takes place…well, we’ll just have to see as time goes along.

Going back to the topic of mulching once more, I use hay, simply because we always usually have some extra laying around because of the cows. I’ll be putting some in the raised bed garden all around our plants. Again, I prefer doing this a week or two after setting out our plants to let them adapt again from being re-planted.

This is very helpful in itself for a number of reasons. The first being, as we mentioned earlier, a weed inhibitor. Secondly, this will break down and actually becomes compost itself. Thirdly, especially here in Florida it gets awfully hot during the summer.

With this being the case, the mulch, hay, grass cuttings from your yard, if you bag it, all help protect the roots from the heat. Also they help, especially in regards to your watering program, because it shades the sun out so to speak, thus allowing your watering to last longer, as you don’t lose so much due to evaporation, this allowing your plants to receive more benefits per “drink,” as you apply them.

Now this is another of those, “this is what I do,” comments. When I plant, I always have a few bags of “Black Cow” on hand, which is a bagged up cow manure, along with other ingredients. When I dig my hole for each plant, I dig them about twice the size I really need to set the plant.

I then add some of the bagged material to the hole, drop the plant in, then I almost fill my hole up with this material. I then water the plant in, pushing down on the material, watering until water is flowing out of the hole. I then finish filling the whole with the original soil, and move on to the next one.

By doing this, watering in and pushing the material down around the plants with my hands, I’ve removed any air pockets from around the plant, and also have given it a good soaking drink by filling the hole with water. In this way, the hole contains the water, giving that “little feller,” or plant, a very beneficial first drink, thus insuring it of getting off to a good start.

Well, I hope this has been a little help to all you fine people this morning, and if you’d like to share any of your ideas or thoughts on this topic of raised bed gardening, I’d sure appreciate it! As I said, this is a “new one” on me!

Thank you so much for stopping by again and we sure look forward to seeing all you guys next time! You’re the best!

God Bless you all! Also remember to keep your eyes open, and your nose in the wind!
Dub…out!

If you’re interested, here’s a few more videos for you guys. One is of getting our manure tilled into our larger garden, prepping it for planting. Another is showing some of the turkeys on our place, and the last is showing how our raised bed garden is coming along.

We hope you enjoy them!