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| My mom’s vegetable garden |
Last week we were in Ohio visiting my mom. We got a chance to visit a lot of farms. As an added bonus my mom’s next door neighbors are organic vegetable farmers. While there we learned a lot about growing food even though they have a significantly different climate. We took what we learned and developed a plan for some changes around here.
- We’ll be eliminating our raised herb beds. We’ve decided to make pallet boxes for our potatoes, which will free up quite a bit of bed space, so the herbs will be finding a permanent location to park in our vegetable beds. This will also help keep the turkeys out of the chives.
- Speaking of raised beds, we’re going to be turning our two smaller beds into raised beds. It’s the only way we’re going to be able to beat the weeds that are in those beds. We’ll be putting weedblock fabric under them to help keep the bindweed and bermuda grass out.
- Douglas Fir is totally fine to build beds out of. The costs of cedar and redwood are astronomical and you don’t want to use pressure treated wood for vegetable beds. The cost of Doug Fir is just a fraction of the cost of redwood. It will last 3-5 years here. Redwood and cedar last about 20 years before replacement. By the time redwood would need to be replaced I could have used Doug Fir and actually spent less money even though I’ve replaced it multiple times.
- It just doesn’t get hot enough here to really get all we can from some plants, like squash, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cucumbers and melons. So to help that along we’re going to put down black plastic on the beds to keep the soil a lot warmer for these varieties.
- I hate to do this, but I think we need to just suck it up and use a rototiller to break up our clay soil and to incorporated compost and manure. Our garden area is just too big and takes too much time to hand dig, especially with everything else we’ve got going on.
I’m hoping these changes will help cut down on our gardening chores.
It's a great time to re-think the garden. Glad you got to visit some others outside of your growing zone, I'm sure it was fun.
We've got to do some re-thinking around here also. I thought I would like our raised beds more, but they dry out too quickly. Although I won't be ripping them out anytime soon, I will be more careful about watering and planning what veggies go there.
Hey Carolyn, we've had raised beds before and we found that the best thing to use in them is actual soil plus some compost. Of course we can't use our native soil because it just moves the problem, but we can find some free dirt somewhere else.
I can vouch for the use of black plastic to increase temps here in the wet, wet, wet, PNW. I had an incredible tomato crop in part thanks to the warmth radiated off the black plastic.
Thanks for posting the great tips you learned!
You gave me some great ideas as we are replanning our garden for next year, as well as deciding on what to do with our additional new space. I really want a pallet potato garden so I'm dreaming that up.