Raised Gardening Beds...and I mean RAISED!
| Gardening in the South can be an experiment in pure frustration.
Over the past years we have tried everything. However, the ants
win out each time and we find ourselves having to poison the beds and
pull up the plants. The poison makes them un-edible and we have
had to turn the beds into flower beds rather than vegetables. Well,
this year we hit the jackpot. Our beds are not just raised beds.
They are really raised!!!!!!!!! What do I mean? Well, each
bed sits on top of 4 ft. high 4X4 pressure treated posts. Our 8X4
ft. beds are raised to waist high. And, when the ants found our
strawberries, all we had to do was sprinkle a bit of poison around each
leg and suddenly, we had no ants. In fact, this is the first year
that we have actually produced from our garden.
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We also do Square Foot Gardening. This has worked very
well for us this year in our raised beds. We planted our bush
beans four down and four across in each square foot. We also
planted an herb in each square along with peas, onions, and lots of
other veggies.
We mixed our own soil for the beds. We placed one part composted manure, one part vermiculite, and one part peat moss. We mixed it up well and shoveled it into the beds. There were times we even mixed it right in the beds to save time. The city of Rock Hill, South Carolina has a recycling, composting area where we go to get out mulch each year. It is free to anyone who wants it. We placed this mulch under all the beds. It is working quite nicely and enhancing the soil at the same time. Our soil is old farm ground and clay based. We have to ad amenities to it to be able to grow anything.
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 No more bending and straining with waist High planting beds!
My husband tried a new procedure for growing potatoes. Unfortunately, he did not raise the raised bed off the ground. The ants found it and we lost them all. If we had followed our own council and raised them even 18 " off the ground, we could have poisoned the ground around the legs and saved the potatoes. We didn't and we lost them. Never again will we plant in the ground. |
Continued #2
When
we aren't using square foot gardening, we divide the bed in half.
that is what we did for our strawberries, watermelons, and
cantaloupe. Each items has 1/2 of the bed. We built a
strawberry tier and then screwed deck screws around the frame and
hung pots of strawberries around the outside to add more space for
our strawberries. The deer only ate a few of the plants. We
had planted 25 or 30 so we had plenty to share.