Peas are ready

The first peas are coming from the hoophouse batches now. "Meteor" was planted March 19th so that's about 70 days - very fast for peas here in the Pacific Northwest. Green Arrow, planted about a week later, has lots of pods but they are all flat still, not ready to pick. Sugar Ann snap peas have a few ready to eat, and many more on the way.

I love peas!

What's growing in the garden now?

It's the end of May, and after a warm early spring we've had a cold wet late spring. Right now, in the hoophouse we have strawberries fruiting (about a month earlier than in the open garden), shelling peas and snap peas are almost ready, and the radishes are finished. Space is ready for peppers and basil once the weather warms up a little more.

Outside, the soup peas are about a foot up the fence, summer squash have just poked their noses out of the ground, another batch of shelling peas is on the way, raspberries and blueberries are flowering and covered in bees, and seedling brassicas, radishes, chard, chickpeas, onions, sunflowers and amaranth are growing well. The potatoes are up too, especially the blue-fleshed ones which have very dark foliage.

How about your garden?

How do Raised Beds Make Gardening Easier?

Raised beds make gardening easier in many ways.  They help you solve difficult issues with your soil, they aid in controlling pests, they improve the amount of produce you can harvest in an area, they’re great at reducing weeds, and they help conserve water.

Any plants that love well-drained soil can benefit from being grown in raised beds.  You don’t have to raise just vegetables.  You can also easily grow herbs, fruits, and flowers in raised beds and make your job easier.

In raised bed gardening, the soil is generally enriched with compost, and mounded up above the level of the surrounding soil. Some raised beds are framed with wood or other material, but others are just left mounded, like the ones I use for my vegetables.

The plants in raised bed gardening can be planted much closer together than the plants in a traditional row garden, because the soil is never compacted, it's enriched, it's deeper, and usually irrigated. This allows the plants to make a continuous leafy cover over the bed, which reduces moisture loss from the soil by evaporation and also helps shade out weeds.

Raised beds can be used to extend the growing season, making it easier to start seeds outdoors earlier, and grow later in the season.  This is a great way to get even more produce out of the area in a season.

If you have soil problems in your garden (including clay, rocks, or contamination of certain kinds), you can build raised beds on top and just bypass your own soil completely.  If you start with completely fresh soil, it doesn’t matter what type of soil you had in your garden to begin with.

Another great benefit of raised bed gardening is the fact that the gardener doesn’t walk on the soil in which the plants are growing.  This helps prevent the soil from being packed down, so the roots can grow through the soil more readily.

You don’t need to till the soil under a raised bed if you don’t want to.  This is very beneficial for people who can’t afford a tiller, or who aren’t physically capable of handling a piece of machinery like this.

You may not have to water raised beds as often as you would a traditional garden.  The soil in raised beds is designed specifically to hold on to water, so you can water less often and in smaller quantities.  This is great for conserving water and saving money. However, raised beds are also designed to drain well, to keep plant roots aerated, and the often expose their sides to sunlight, and these can mean that you need to water more often. In hot, dry climates raised beds are often not the best choice: sunken beds which hold water can be used instead.

Raised beds can be raised up to any height. Frames can be built on top of perforated plywood bases (to allow drainage), and then raised to any height.  This allows handicapped and elderly people to easily reach their plants to tend to them.  For people in wheelchairs, this could be one of the only ways they can garden well.

And pests are easier to control, because plants are in a more confined area.  This makes it much easier to spot potential problems, and it also makes it easier to get rid of potential problems before they take over your entire garden.

What is Raised Bed Gardening Anyway?

Raised bed gardening is a way of growing plants inside beds that are raised up above the normal level of the soil in the garden. They’re often housed inside a frame (wood, concrete block, old logs, rocks, or anything which wil hold in the soil), but they can also be unframed and simply raised above the surrounding pathways. Mine are almost all unframed, although I do have one herb bed in the front yard which is surrounded by rocks.

The soil in the bed may be mixed in with tilled soil underneath, or it can simply be new soil placed on top of untilled ground. If you're going to do that, make sure you lay a layer of cardboard or lots of layers of wet newspaper on the ground first, before you build your bed on top, or you'll have weeds and grass growing up into your new bed!

There are many great benefits to growing plants in raised beds. One of the biggest benefits is the ability to harvest more produce from the same space. Raised bed gardens can actually double or even triple the amount of produce harvested from the space! This is due to the fact that the square footage needed for pathways is reduced considerably, and more space can be devoted to the plants.

Another great benefit to growing in raised beds is the fact that you can improve your soil conditions more readily, and you can even grow plants in areas with extremely inhospitable soil. If your garden is typically very sandy or you have a lot of clay, it can be difficult to grow much in it. But if you create a raised bed, you can simply put your own purchased or created soil mix into the frame and grow your plants in that.

Weeds are also much less of a problem in the typical raised bed. Because the soil is confined, it’s much easier to spot any weeds that do pop up, and the weed seeds in the existing soil are buried under far too much soil to sprout in most cases.

The frames can also be built with a bottom (with drainage holes) and placed on tables so handicapped and elderly people can reach their plants to care for them more easily. This is a major benefit for people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to properly care for a garden.

This type of gardening was made popular by Mel Bartholomew in his book and television series called Square Foot Gardening. He developed a system that requires about 80% less space than traditional types of gardening, which I highly recommend for gardeners who are just starting out.

Instead of being just a standard raised bed, the bed is divided into sections that house plants of various sizes. It uses special soil mix that is free of weeds and is ideal for growing almost any kind of plants. It uses less water, is all organic, and uses far fewer seeds than traditional gardening. His system claims you can produce 5 times more in the same space of a traditional garden.

The system divides each square foot into a grid, based on what type of plants you wish to grow in that section. If you want to grow a large plant like broccoli or cabbage, it would take one entire square foot, so that section wouldn’t be divided at all. If you want to grow radishes, you might section that square foot into sixteen separate spaces, each one housing a single radish!
Other similar systems have been brought out. Cubed Foot Gardening is very similar to Square Foot Gardening. The creator of this particular system is Christopher O. Bird, and he credits Mel Bartholomew for creating the original system. Bartholomew even gave the system an endorsement!

You don’t have to use a grid system at all. You can use a raised bed to plant a wildflower garden or an herb garden with no definable organization. This works just fine. You don’t have to restrict yourself to a grid-based system if you don’t want to. Raised beds are very flexible!