It’s amazing looking back at the garden photos from April. This season we tried two new techniques: planting in Straw Bale and planting in Raised Beds.
Home Depot sells these great concrete blocks with the sides pre-cut to slide boards into place to make the raised bed walls. We used rebar in the corners to help stabilize the blocks.
After the beds were complete we used the lasagna technique to fill the bed. The bottom layer was cardboard to help keep the weeds out.
The layers alternate dry, wet, dry, wet material and then spray each layer with water.
- Cardboard
- Humus of decomposing compost and leaves.
- Straw
- Grass Clippings
- Soil
The top layer of soil is the thickest at about a foot deep. This is our pile of compost/top soil that has been decomposing for years. It’s a mixture of grass clipping and “weeds”.
The raised beds are ready for the final layer of soil! At 10′ by 4′ that’s a lot of loads with the wheel barrel!
Not only will the decomposing layers create and extend the growing season but we also found some old window pains to create a cold frame. We are excited to see how long into the fall and winter we will be able to grow greens.
This is the most current photo of the raised bed. We ran out of space in the garden for tomatoes and decided to fill a bed with the extra plants. As you can see they grew so tall that we had to build a frame and create several layers to support the plants. We just started harvesting ripe cherry and grape tomatoes! What is your favorite type of tomato?
