Hyp3rlink wants your help, gardeners!
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Raised bed gardening advice and tips, veggies in a hot region yard
- Thread starter weemadarthur
- Start date
Hyp3rlink wants your help, gardeners!
Thanks weemadarthur!
So, as it says in the OP, looking for any tips / guidance for building a raised-bed garden. I'm starting with a 4'x8'x11" cedar bed that I ordered online and should get it by Friday. In the meantime I'm looking to pick-up the items needed for the raised-bed (soil, lining etc.) and other basic gardening tools (I only have gloves so far).
Would love to get some help from fellow Era-Gardeners and then hopefully share stories of my harvest in the coming months!
So, as it says in the OP, looking for any tips / guidance for building a raised-bed garden. I'm starting with a 4'x8'x11" cedar bed that I ordered online and should get it by Friday. In the meantime I'm looking to pick-up the items needed for the raised-bed (soil, lining etc.) and other basic gardening tools (I only have gloves so far).
Would love to get some help from fellow Era-Gardeners and then hopefully share stories of my harvest in the coming months!
OP
OP
About all I can share is the importance of consistent watering for food plants. Did you purchase a feeder hose to go with your raised bed? And natural mulch to help reduce the difficulty of weeding?
I grow carrots, tomatoes, a couple varieties of peppers, parsnips, leeks, and beets in zone 7a, OP. My total space is about equivalent to yours, we plan it out so we always have something in year round - get a veggie gardening calendar for your region (your state dept of agriculture or local universities are likely to have this info on their website in a PDF) and pick a couple of things you like for each season.
As well as water mentioned above (important) you will also have to feed, because veggies take a lot out of your soil. Do not use regular flower feed, make sure you use the right kind for edibles, in case you wind up with something like molybdenum poisoning or whatever.
You will have pests. We use pop-up mesh things to keep most bugs off, but at some points in the year you'll be out there twice a day picking hornworms off your tomatoes. We keep bigger pests like rabbits and deer out by having a big-ass fence around our whole lot, and multiple dogs. Your mileage may vary.
Lastly, don't be disappointed when you lose crops due to whatever random weather event happens. You'll find that some things, even certain varieties of things work, and others do not. You have to pay a certain amount of attention to things to make it work, but the end results are sorta worth it!
As well as water mentioned above (important) you will also have to feed, because veggies take a lot out of your soil. Do not use regular flower feed, make sure you use the right kind for edibles, in case you wind up with something like molybdenum poisoning or whatever.
You will have pests. We use pop-up mesh things to keep most bugs off, but at some points in the year you'll be out there twice a day picking hornworms off your tomatoes. We keep bigger pests like rabbits and deer out by having a big-ass fence around our whole lot, and multiple dogs. Your mileage may vary.
Lastly, don't be disappointed when you lose crops due to whatever random weather event happens. You'll find that some things, even certain varieties of things work, and others do not. You have to pay a certain amount of attention to things to make it work, but the end results are sorta worth it!
OP
OP
For mulch? One year instead of purchased mulch, I took advantage of my local city or county free mulch program, where you can pick up the stuff they chip up from storm downage and things.
Turns out, it was so full of thistle and other weed seeds, it was worse than no mulch for weeding purposes. The value of purchased mulch is that that stuff is steamed to kill weed seeds. It's worth the money unless you have a paid gardening service pulling your weeds for you.
I'll add feeder hose and natural mulch to the list of things I need to pick-up.
Thanks for the feedback! I already downloaded the gardening calendar from the county website and we'll narrow down the items to plant this winter.
I'll be using organic potting mix for the bulk of the bed and then I'll add some organic fertilizer (need to research more for this)
This garden will be in our fenced backyard, so hopefully no big pests like rabbit or deer.
Right now I'm wondering if I need a liner along the cedar bed to make it last longer! Some people suggest not to use anything as the liner can trap water and make the wood rot faster than otherwise.
Are you setting the bed on soil, or (say) on gravel? If it's a very porous substrate (or if it's even a little bit uneven) you run the risk of just washing your soil out the bottom of your bed. We put in liners because we put the beds on a gravel area - we did one year have a swimming pool instead of a veg bed, but that year everything was a swimming pool
My family and I live in the East Bay and we built four 4' x 6' raised beds and put them in the backyard this May. Our were primarily made out of redwood boards, though we did sandwich them with pressure treated 2x4's on the top and bottom for extra rigidity. The bottom of ours is covered with chicken wire (hopefully will keep gophers out while allowing drainage) and also sits on top of some landscaping fabric from Costco. Finally, we put in a number of different layers of material to help retain moisture. The bottom layer is cardboard (finally found a use of all those boxes from Amazon), then straw, and a thin layer of shredded paper. On top of that we put a thick layer of local soil (had to grind it up as it's pretty hard, lots of clay) and then finished it off with about foot and a half of garden soil.
Overall things have gone pretty well, we've been able to grow our own arugula, basil, beans, chard, cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes, and turnips. We tried carrots, but didn't thin them enough so they didn't work out. We've also noticed that the boxes that featured more potting soil than local soil have dropped by as much as four inches as things have compressed, but I think ymmv. Not sure which part of the Bay Area you live in but in the East Bay Berkley Horticultural Nursery has lots of great seeds and vegetable starters. In the North Bay I'd recommend Annie's Annuals in Richmond (Berkley Hort. actually gets a lot of their plants from them). Wegman's in Redwood City also isn't bad, but I prefer the prior two.
Hope some of this was helpful and wish you lots of happy growing!
Overall things have gone pretty well, we've been able to grow our own arugula, basil, beans, chard, cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes, and turnips. We tried carrots, but didn't thin them enough so they didn't work out. We've also noticed that the boxes that featured more potting soil than local soil have dropped by as much as four inches as things have compressed, but I think ymmv. Not sure which part of the Bay Area you live in but in the East Bay Berkley Horticultural Nursery has lots of great seeds and vegetable starters. In the North Bay I'd recommend Annie's Annuals in Richmond (Berkley Hort. actually gets a lot of their plants from them). Wegman's in Redwood City also isn't bad, but I prefer the prior two.
Hope some of this was helpful and wish you lots of happy growing!
Cinder blocks is one good one, and also lasts basically forever.
Another option is finding a source for free pallets and looking for clean ones (usually means there are low or single use and domestic) and stamped HT for heat treated.
If the raised bed is only 11 inch I would reccomend digging down at least a foot as well.
The cedar kits you find online are usually pretty flimsy boards and don't stand up well to a large amound of soil above ground level.