This is the section of family preparedness about gardening.
The Real secret to successful gardens with minimal effort is raised bed.
GARDENING 203
No book about home storage and beginning preparedness would be complete without a chapter on gardening. Today about 80 percent of the cost of our food is energy related ei-ther in the production stage or transporting the food to our homes. Home canning of a case of home grown produce can save as barrel of imported oil. Gardening is not a difficult thing to do. You can grow a very productive garden in a relatively small space. Even most apart-ment dwellers can grow some food in containers. Every little bit helps the environment and the economy as well as you bottom line.
RAISED BED INTENSIVE GARDEN: HOW TO BUILD ONE FOR SELF SUFFICIENCY
What is this section? It is a guide to grow more of our own food as easily as possible. It contains instructions and directions to accomplish that goal. Basically I am a lazy person. Do something once, do it right and enjoy the benefits. This is the secret of intensive bed garden-ing. They are more work in the beginning but require less work later on.
I will show you how to build beds and care for them. I cannot show you how to grow a garden. You must learn that for yourself.
This book is not intended to be the end all of gardening books. It is a place to start with raised bed gardening. My focus is to grow the most food with the least long term effort. You can make your garden beautiful. I just don’t have the time. We don’t claim that you will grow food like we do. Each garden produces according to the efforts and the love of the owner.
WHAT IS AN INTENSIVE RAISED BED GARDEN?
A raised bed garden is just that. It is a small bed maybe 5 feet wide by 5 feet long. The bed is constructed to provide maximum growth attributed to the plants. The nutrition is right, the correct amount of light is present, the soil temperature is okay, and the bed always has the correct amount of water.
Intensive bed gardening has been around for a long time. There is evidence that this method of gardening existed in ancient Egypt during the Israelite enslavement. Some re-searchers have found evidence of this type of farming in the Late Classic Maya cultures around 300 to 900 AD. There is historical relic in the American Southwest that shows the use of intensive bed farming on a fairly large scale. My question is why it took so long for people to recognize this very effective way of growing food.
The present day evolution of intensive bed gardening is attributed to Chadwick of the University of California, Santa Cruz. He took a barren hillside and through the use of what he called French intensive gardening turned it in to a lush hillside full of produce and flowers. John Jeavons continue with his work on another campus. John Jeavons has written several books on the subject.
So what is an intensive raised bed garden and why is it call intensive. It is a constructed bed, usually with sides made of some rot resistant material that is filled with those things that plants like to have to grow the best. The bed can be tailored to a specific plant. I have successfully used this method for field gardening, however, the word intense takes on a new meaning when using this method in large plots without walls to contain the beds. These are a lot of work.
My beds are generally built out of scrap materials. The ones that I am constructing this year use old metal building siding that was given to me and some old treated 2 X 4 for stakes to hold them together. This is a typical raised bed.
You can see that the construction of a raised bed is simple. It is a fair amount of work. Make sure that you corner and side stakes are secure as they hold the weight of the dirt. Sometime it is necessary to frame the top of the bed with 2 X 4s. This will hold the sides.
PLAN YOUR GARDEN
Planning your garden is important. It is important because a well thought out plan makes construction and maintenance easier. Here are a few things that you must consider when planning your garden:
What are the total dimensions of your garden area? Make a scaled drawing of where you want to put your garden. That means measure it, don’t just sketch it out.
Decide what you want to grow in your garden.
How long are your arms? What’s that got to do with anything? How long your arms are determines the width of your bed. How far can you comfortably reach? I can reach 2 and half feet easily. If your arms are shorter, then make you beds narrower. This makes working in your beds much easier, after all this is the lazy person’s way to garden.
Lay out your plan on the ground to see how it looks.
Plan where you will put your pipe for your watering system. This can either be above ground or buried.
Determine how wide you are going to make the pathways between the beds. I recom-mend about 3 feet, however, use your own judgment.
WHAT TOOLS ARE REQUIRED?
Tools are a special thing to me. I love tools. Good tools, great tools, expensive tools, cheap tools and everything in between. Most of the tools that I recommend, and tools that you need, you probably all ready own. If you must buy tools then buy the best quality that you can afford. Do not believe that only the name brand stuff is best. There are a lot of dis-count tool sources around. I have bought a lot of tools on eBay and Amazon. My favorite discount tool store is Harbor Freight Tools. They have a store nearby and this is unlucky for me because I buy too much. Tool List for raised bed gardening:
• Shovel round point
• Shovel square point
• Spading fork
• Long handled 3 or four tined hoe or rack
• Sledge hammer
• Portable electric drill
• Portable electric saw.
• Flat blade screw driver
• Phillips screw driver
• Slip joint pliers
• Miscellaneous drills
• Assorted garden trowels
• Garden hoe
• Wheel barrow; when it comes to wheel barrows I have a real preference to the kind with two wheels in front. They are easier to maneuver in a garden and don’t tip over so easily.
• Pruning clippers
• Claw hammer
• Some type of heavy metal bar—to make stake holes. My favorite is a piece of ¾ inch square bar from an old rod weeder.
• Hatchet This may be a small hand axe or anything that you can use to sharpen stakes and cut branches.
• Garden sprayer—hand held.
• Spray bottle
• Scissors
• Garden Rake
• 4 tined rake
• Pitch fork
• Miscellaneous small garden tools. Choose what you like.
That four tine rake, in the center, is one of my favorite raised bed gardening tools. It is used for bed preparation in the spring and a multitude of other tasks.
That’s quite a list. You probably have most of them. Don’t go out and buy a tool unless you really need it. If it’s expensive and you only need it once—rent it. Tools are BSO for me (Big Shiny Objects—things that I want, don’t really need and cost a lot of money.) Buy what you need. This is all about growing food and saving money.
WHAT MATERIALS ARE REQUIRED?
The intent of this book is to help you to avoid high cost to create your raised beds. If you can afford the best materials than buy them, however, there is a lot of recyclable stuff that will work just as well. The materials that you will require for the construction of the bed frame and walls fall into these broad areas:
• Wall material—boards, old cement blocks, cement board, old building siding and so forth. Make sure that any wood is treated to prevent rot.
• Material for posts and stakes. This can range from old steel fence post to brand-new ornamental posts. Again make sure that any wood is treated to prevent rot.
• Miscellaneous screws and nails.
• Other hardware as needed
When you are building a lot of beds and have little money being the community collector helps. I collect old and discarded building materials to build my raised beds.
HOW TO CONSTRUCT A RAISED BED
Raised bed construction is just like any other building project. You need to have a plan. I have never drawn a formal plan for raised beds. The sequence of construction goes some-thing like this:
Lay out your individual beds in your garden. This works unless you are like me and don’t get everything done the first time. My first raised beds (see snow pictures of my garden) were not done with walls. These beds were just mounds of growing medium constructed to promote maximum plant growth. If you need to fix your beds and continue construction from year to year that is okay too.
Dig out the bottom of the beds. I like to dig out my beds two feet below the ground sur-face and put the dirt to the side. This is the part that takes work. I cheat as I do gardening by John Deere. Our little 20 horse power compact tractor with a front bucket does the initial dig when there is room. This is a lot of work but well worth the effort. This first removal of the soil allows you to provide adequate drainage for the bed. It also provides an easy path for deep rooted plants.
At this point I usually put up the walls. When I use old sheet metal the metal provides a barrier for most of the deep rooted weed and plants that might penetrate the bed. We have lots of grasses here in Eastern Washington that spread by their roots. These grasses don’t seem to go under the metal walls. The walls are constructed by driving stakes or posts into the ground at the edge of the beds. The metal is then fastened to the posts. My 5 foot by 5 foot bed has a post at each corner and one in the middle of each panel. The beds that are 5 feet wide and longer have posts or stakes about every four feet. If you feel that you need to put 2 X 4’s to stiffen and support the sides, then use them. This depends a lot upon what kind of material you are using for the walls. Just be sure that your wall materials have high rot resistance and a long life.
After I have the walls up I fill in the bottom of the bed. Believe it or not most anything can be use in the bottom foot of the bed. Mine are filled with old limbs, discarded wood, wood chips, hay, straw, old paper bags cardboard, small and medium rocks. In general, any-thing that will provide drainage and trap nutrients for the bed makes good fill materials.
After the bottom is filled in, the bed is covered with a layer of cardboard, old paper sacks, old feed sacks or anything that will create a decomposable barrier over the bottom layer.
The next 6 inches or so is soil that was removed from the bed.
On top of the soil a layer of organic material is placed. This can be manure, straw, old hay, compost (if you have enough but compost is best used later), grass clippings or even wood chips.
The next layer needs to be compost or manure. You could even buy potting soil for this layer. Some of the authors that talk about small raised beds talk about this. This not an op-tion for my bed as it just costs too much. This layer really needs to be loaded with nutrient. Since I am not an organic gardening purist, many times I will seed this layer with commercial fertilizer.
My next layer is another layer of heavy organic stuff like old hay, straw, wood chips or if I have enough compost. Rotted manure works well here also. If there is a lot of woody mate-rial in this layer it is seeded heavy with a high nitrogen fertilizer.
The top layer of the bed is composed of garden soil, the stuff you dug out and compost. By this time you should have a mound above your bed of about 6 inches to a foot. This won’t last long. Put a lot of water on your bed and let it set a while. The aging of the bed is why most of my new beds are started in the fall and finished in late winter before planting begins.
If I am going to plant seeds in a raised bed a little extra preparation might be in order. Screen the top layer of soil after you have completed your bed. What I use is a frame with quarter inch hardware cloth on it. It is about 2 and half feet square. This takes out all of the bigger pieces and makes seeding small seeds easier.
WATERING SYSTEMS
Everyone has his own preference for watering a garden. It doesn’t seem to make much difference as to what kind of system is used, if the garden gets the right amount of water. Here lies the secret. Different plants need different amounts of water. My rhubarb takes more water than my herbs and some dummy planted them next to one another. We are working on that problem. Think I will start a new rhubarb bed this year and dig out the old one next year, all because of a lack of planning.
• There are basically three types of watering system:
• Overhead sprinklers
• Flood irrigation
Drip systems and modified micro irrigation systems.
My favorite is drip irrigation and modified micro irrigation systems. What do I mean by modified micro irrigation systems? This is a system that might use micro sprinkler, in line drippers and perforated hose. Soaker hose also can be used with this type of system. Usually these systems operate on less than 20 pounds per squaring pressure. The real drawback to these systems is that your water needs to be quite clean. Our irrigation water, from a pres-surized system, is really dirty. A sand filter will be installed this year and back flushed as necessary. This will provide clean water to our micro system. This is a lot of extra work but necessary.
Overhead sprinklers are rotating sprinklers on a riser pipe that is generally taller than you tallest plants. I like using this type of irrigation on my field corn. This is one of the sim-plest irrigations systems to set up. Just run pipes or a hose to each sprinkler and you are done. I you have tall risers; you may need to stake them to prevent the wind from blowing the risers over. This type of system works at line pressure whatever that may be, usually in the 45 psi to 60 psi range.
Flood irrigation is just that, the garden is flooded with water. This does not work too well with raised beds.
There is a lot of information on the web about drip irrigation systems. Do your research because I can’t tell you what is best. Everyone’s garden is different and the way that it gets water is different also. Here is a fairly good source on drip irrigation. http://www.dripirrigation.com
FENCING
Why do I include fencing in a raise bed gardening book? Well, unless you live in Whims Villa you are going to have critters running around. If you have a small farm or just some acreage, you will have critter problems. The critters I am talking about in general are the one that we raise. These can include:
Dogs
Chickens
Sheep
Cows
Deer
Rabbits
Two legged creatures with hands, sometimes we call them small children.
When you can afford it, my favorite fencing is chain link. I don’t go to all the pains that are exercised for commercial chain link security fence. We just put in posts and brace posts. Then the chain link fabric is stretched up next to the posts. The fabric is rapped on the ends and stapled to the posts. My preference is 6 foot chain link because our zoning won’t let us put up a higher fence without a special permit and in Benton County Washington they are a pain and expensive.
If you look at my gardens you will see that most of the fence is woven wire. Here I sug-gest that you use less than four inch square woven wire with all the squares the same from bottom to top. Three inch squares might be better if you have a lot of chickens.
- Building a fence is simple:
- Just lay out the area to be fenced.
- Mark your corners
- String a line from corner to corner.
- Measure the distance that you have decided to separate your post. Get this from the PLAN you made.
- Dig post holes for the corner posts and the brace posts.
- The other posts for the fence can either be set posts (those you dig a post hole for), or driven posts.
- Make sure that you have planned for your gates.
Don’t build your gates until you have your fence built. I don’t know how it happens but my gates never fit if I build them first. That is probably why I don’t buy gates. The other problem with purchased gates is that they are darn expensive. Install your gates and you are done.
A fence is a very important part of a garden if you are planning to produce a lot of food for your family. My neighbor’s chickens destroyed over 500 pounds of tomatoes in my gar-den last year because I did not have an adequate fence.