Grow more per square foot, with less water, less back stress, fewer pest problems and an extended growing season, by growing vegetables in a raised bed. Nan presents different examples of raised beds and includes construction diagrams plus some tips and tricks she has learned in her years of raised bed gardening
Raise Your Vegetables in Bed
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Raise Your Vegetables in Bed
While you wait for your vegetable seeds to sprout, you have plenty of time to prepare your planting beds. For vegetables, annual flowers, and herbs, I always advocate for growing them in raised beds rather than in the ground. In regions like Southern California and the southwest, soils have very little organic matter, water is limited, and summers are hot and dry. In our backyards, growing vegetables in the ground is a big challenge. Growing them in raised beds, on the other hand, allows us to create the ideal conditions meeting vegetable plants’ needs. Extra water is limited to just the soil in the bed – fertilizer too – so it’s not wasted on ornamental plants that are just as happy – or happier – growing dry. On-ground beds For decades, I’ve gardened in 22” tall redwood beds that sit on the ground. While I still love my handsome wooden…
A Guide to Preparing Your Garden for Planting
May is the best month to plant your summer vegetable garden. Before you put those baby tomato, eggplant, and pepper seedlings into the ground, refresh the soil for maximum production. Step #1: Check the soil level. Raised beds and planting containers should be full to within one or two inches of the top. Over time, the organic matter breaks down, and you’ll notice the soil mixture sink lower and lower. If they need a refill, here’s how: For raised beds use for a 60/40 topsoil mix – which is 60% “dirt” mixed with 40% compost. Don’t bother with bagged raised bed mixes. For potting mix, go with the highest quality potting mix (not garden soil, not planting mix, not compost) you can find. Your plants will do only as well as the planting mix they grow in. Use the best for your plants to grow their best. Step #2: Amend…
Growing Tomatoes
Of all the vegetables I grow, tomatoes are my favorite. Hands down, it’s tomatoes. A few years ago, I grew 18 different kinds of tomatoes in my garden beds, just to see how they all compared. It was glorious. I’m often asked which tomatoes I recommend. That is an impossible question to answer. Everyone’s growing conditions are different, not just in different states or different counties or neighborhoods, but even from one backyard to the next, the growing conditions can be surprisingly different. And those differences determine whether a particular kind of tomato will thrive and produce, or simply survive. Two days' harvest from my garden There are thousands of varieties of tomatoes available as seed and certainly hundreds now sold in nurseries as seedlings. So rather than urge you to grow my favorite (which from that summer of 18 tomatoes, turns out to be a Japanese hybrid called Apple…
