Early spring is the perfect time to start building some raised beds. First, however, there are a few things to consider, such as: B. the size of the raised bed and the material used.
Stone, cement, and metal are great choices of materials to build your frame, but most people use wood. Get the most rot-resistant wood for your project. Cedar is expensive but can take 10 years to complete. Hemlock and spruce are cheaper, if not quite as durable.
Your raised bed can be any shape, but a simple rectangle or square will work just fine. Using boards 2 inches in diameter to help them withstand the rainy and dry seasons, build your frame 10 to 12 inches high and 3 to 4 feet wide.
Try not to build your frame longer than ten feet. Even then, you may need a support board so the sides of the loft bed don’t bend over time.
After building your raised bed frame, plan for other problems that may arise. Sometimes the wooden corners rot. To fix this, you can try metal raised bed ceilings. These work well and you can reuse them even if you replace older wooden planks on your raised bed.
You may also have problems with living things, such as B. the listener Ursula in Pittsford. Ursula asked what to do when moles invade raised beds and chew beets and carrot tops.
Placing a hardware cloth under your raised bed during construction can prevent small animals from burrowing into your raised bed garden and treating it like a salad bar. When controlling weeds, putting cardboard or landscaping fabric under the bed can also help weed growth.
Building a larger version of a raised bed can also work and is easier to reach and therefore gentler on your knees and back!
Q: I was wondering how to plant in a raised bed one at a time. Mine is 6 by 3 and divided into 18 squares. Do I plant one square of spinach, then harvest it and plant more in the same square? – Kim in South Burlington
Start in the spring by planting one of the squares in your raised bed with a cool season crop like spinach. Then when it’s warmer, try French beans in the same spot. Then, later in the fall, return to another crop in the cool season like kale.
You get three crops from each square per season! The aim is to use plants of similar size and growth patterns. This can really extend the harvest in each of your places.
Q: I have always planted raised beds and my seedling tomatoes in rows. Can you explain in more detail how to change this method? – Edie in West Marlboro
Plant tomatoes in a zigzag pattern to make use of every inch possible. Keep the plants two to three feet apart, then any floor space under the plants can be used for other smaller plants like greens and radishes. Try this pattern and you may have room to pound in a few more tomato plants.
Here is another question from a listener Carol from Middlebury about raised beds:
“I have a 3-by-8 raised bed in which I plant tomatoes, lettuce, cukes, peppers, beets and cabbage. I always plant my tomatoes in the easternmost row so that the sun comes from south to south west, gets everything lots of sun. My raised bed is high enough for me to sit on the edge so I plant my cukes along part of the westernmost edge and train the vines to hang over the edge of the bed. That seems to work fine, but lets me not much room for crop rotation. “
This can be a problem if you only have one raised bed. Anything you plant will fit nicely, although you may not be able to rotate the plants in this configuration.
If you plant cukes and tomatoes in the same spots every season, you may want to give your soil a year or two off and plant them in a container. Then plant tomatoes and cucumbers in the raised bed again.
We’ll be asking questions about pruning for the next episode!
All Things Gardening is done by you, the listener! Submit your gardening questions and riddles and Charlie can answer them in the upcoming episodes. You can also leave a voicemail with your garden question by calling VPR at (802) 655-9451.
Hear All Things in the Garden during the Sunday weekend edition with VPR presenter Mary Engisch, Sunday morning at 9:35 a.m.
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