Raised bed gardening
If you live in New England, I don’t have to tell you about the new crop of stones that will appear in your garden every year, no matter how long you’ve been tilling the soil! Partly due to this and partly because I just ran out of room within the confines of my poor excuse for a fence, I decided a couple of years ago to try a small raised bed.
It took about 4 bags of topsoil (which unfortunately seemed to come with a few of its own small rocks!) half a bale of peat moss, and half a bag of composted manure to fill the box. I’ve had mixed luck with it — the bell peppers that I planted there the first year were quite happy and produced well, but the cauliflower plants didn’t quite make it to maturity the following year.
It is very noticeable that although the crabgrass constantly threatens to take over my regular veggie garden, the raised bed is almost weed free. This is a huge help in itself, as my time in the garden is very limited since I have both a brick and mortar store and a web store to manage and must also find time to make the handcrafted items that I sell.
This year I noticed that the soil level had dropped considerably, so I filled the remaining space with compost from the pile in the corner of my yard. I’ve planted several eggplant plants in the raised bed and several more in the regular garden area and it is now obvious that the ones in the raised bed are growing at almost twice the rate of the ones in the garden. I think that it’s a combination of the warmer soil in the raised bed and the compost. Now if I could just convince my garden helper cat that it really isn’t an extra large kitty litter box…..