The pictures of everyone's gardens are so beautiful. Years ago, when I had a garden, I did raised beds and it was so much easier on my back as well as fewer weeds to deal with. I used to have a girlfriend (who has since passed away due to a spider bite, she was highly allergic) who was in a wheel chair. She wanted to have flowers and a few vegetables but needless to say planting them in the ground as well as in a raised bed made it impossible for her to get to them. Her husband made some benches that were high enough she could roll up to them and she put her plants in pots. It worked very well for her and she had her flowers as well as tomato, bell pepper, squash and strawberry plants along with other things.
I'd like to do grow some more vegetables on the balcony next year, but I need to figure out how to keep the cats away from them. I'll probably try to plant some catnip or some other type of cat grass for them, as well, since they absolutely love eating whatever is out there.
I cut the rest of the asparagus ferns yesterday, fertilized the bed and topped it off with several inches of compost. I think I have enough compost left to fill the last bed after I harvest the sweet potatoes. The next step is a thick layer of pine straw between the beds. After a frost or two we'll add chopped leaves or straw to cover the strawberries. We'll plant a row or two of garlic soon and then we should be done until spring.
We used straw one year and it grew and we were pulling up the straw out of our gardens. Old newspapers and acrdboards are supposed to be good for that.
Are you sure that you used straw and not hay ? Straw is usually not cut until the oats (or whatever grain) is harvested , so there should be very few remaining grains, if any. Hay, on the other hand, is harvested before the grass goes to seed usually, and there can be grass and also weed seeds in the hay. Straw is very yellow, and hollow stems, where hay is often green, or at least greenish, and much heavier, and solid stems. It also usually costs a whole lot more than straw since it is used for livestock feed, and straw is only good for bedding.
No, it was straw. I have a bale on my back deck with lots of seeds or whatever they are laying under and around the part that I have used in places. I got this bale for the animals and some of my outdoor cats so their made beds would be warmer.
Straw will have some seeds but they will be wheat seeds (or other grain), not grass and weeds like hay has. There are a lot less seeds and they are easy to pull out.
Those are some great gardens y'all have shared. This was our first "raised beds" and since it was our first year gardening we were very happy with it. Now that we have a lot more room to grow things, we will be even happier.
I had wanted to try doing some planting in straw bales this year, as I mentioned above, and I am but they are not the kind of bales I wanted. I had wanted the bales like the ones that farmers bale in their fields, held together with twine. But, I don't have a vehicle large enough to fit even one of them. I'm sure I could have borrowed or rented a truck, but instead I decided to try the much smaller bales they sell at the Tractor Supply Company. However, I don't think they will work well. It's not just the size, although the larger bales would have worked better. The bigger problem is that these bales are compressed tightly together in an entirely haphazard arrangement, so I don't know whether the roots are going to be able to dig down through it. I've replaced the plastic bands that held the bales so tightly together with string that was not nearly as tightly bound as the plastic bands, but the bales are still tightly compressed. I couldn't poke my finger into the bale. I have planted some onions on a couple of bales, and it's possible that they will loosen up some with watering. I still have six more bales, so I'll try some other stuff as well. Root crops would do great in regular bales, I think but probably not so well with these. I might try some carrots on another couple of bales, then maybe some herbs and some beans; perhaps the raised bale will reduce the insect problems that I had with the beans last year. If nothing else, the straw can be used to layer my compost next winter, once the leaves are covered with snow, and I can get some regular straw bales next spring.
My cousins are over 50 and live in Oklahoma. This year they are using raised beds and love it! Because of raccoons and deer, they have also put fencing around the beds.
Bumping this old thread to add something I found while perusing the Amazon Outlet today. I ordered one of these to try; it has very good reviews.
@Beth Gallagher Sort of like a huge Jiffy Pot. Raised beds are the only way especially as we age. I bought six 4-foot tall (to prevent bending over very far) 3-foot diameter pots that I use. It was spendy the first year for the soil, but now each fall I remove about 1/8th of the soil and work in a lot of organics and it really makes for some rich soil by spring. I grind up all my compost ingredients, so it converts in just a few months assisted by locally made organic composting enzymes.
We used to grow almost everything in raised beds, but discovered that it made the slug problem much worse, so we did away with them. We now do most things in the ground and use the tractor to do the work that we used to do by hand...except weeding carrots. That Amazon 100-gallon thing looks interesting for some things like strawberries.
That is really interesting Don. Were your raised beds made from wood? Here we have a bad slug problem ground planting, but with my hard smooth plastics pots, I haven't had one slug. Also, I keep all of them on my concrete patio.