we moved & are settling into our new home on the arkansas-oklahoma border. the first goal of our new home was to build raised beds. with some untreated wood, tools & a little elbow grease, we built four garden beds. we used the mu extension publication as our guide. (by the way, if you haven't connected with an extension office near you, i highly recommend it. they have a wealth of knowledge & are paid to help you!)
with our small amount of space, we used every inch of growing room-
planting shade-loving swiss chard in between tomato plants
& building trellises for squash & cucumber to climb (for this trellis, we used bamboo & gardening twine).
we are making progress in this bare yard, one step at a time.
what are some of the ways you use your garden space efficiently?
I love our extension office. Living in AZ complicates our growing, and they provide the insight I need. I try to use whatever I have which means container gardening right now.
ReplyDeletecongrats on the new place! the beds look fabulous!
ReplyDeleteThe beds look great and congrats on the new place. My husband and I divided up our tiny backyard. He gets the shade for relaxing and playing with his birds. I get the sunny side for growing veggies. I try to squeeze everything I can into the sunny side, but am always wishing for more space.
ReplyDeleteI love your trellises! They are more attractive than the one I made for my peas this year. Do you plant the seeds inside the trellis, or around the outsides of it? This seems like a silly question, but I am truly wondering!
ReplyDeletewe planted our seeds around the legs of the trellis (3 to each leg). we will thin them out once the plants mature.
ReplyDeleteI cram my space with food. I do a lot of succession planting, ie: early in spring I plant lettuce/spinach/swiss chard/cilantro and then once it gets hot I add tomatoes right in the middle of the greens to grow up and shade them. I also often plant tall sunflowers in the middle of lettuce beds to bring dappled shade to the shade-lovers.
ReplyDelete6512 and growing- excellent ideas! i might just have to try your sunflowers & lettuce idea.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I see many building raised beds and finding them an efficient way to garden, we do it differently. On the certified organic farm that we live on, in addition to other pasture crops grown, our landowner rents out garden plots to gardeners who want to know the chemical history of the land, and garden organically. We began by determining how much space we wanted and then only once we had the area tilled (or you can dig it over) and dug out the rows and topped each row, thus building up the beds without the need for building them out of wood. Far easier, IME, and we can manage rotations easily by changing the rows up any which way. Scroll through my blog for photos of how we do this. We practise no-till gardening now (based on the One Straw Revolution book) and use our tools to shape and make the beds. We have (now) several hundred square feet of garden in the space where I see your built boxes, so there is far more space to grow and no mowing between required. Just our experience I wanted to share!! And i won't have to replace or mend deteriorating wood, and the pests that can come with it.
ReplyDelete~Erin