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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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…
What are Seeds?
Vegetable Seeds are amazing little things. They look like dead specs of wood but when the temperature is just right, they have something to grow on, and enough light, all you need is water, and they sprout. I’ve been growing plants from seed for years and years, and I’m still in awe of the process. Seeds are so tiny and in just weeks, they grow into huge plants that make food! What are seeds? Every organism’s goal is to reproduce, to perpetuate its species. That’s true for humans, insects, mammals, birds, fungus, and every other living thing, including plants. As plants grow, they reach a point of maturity when they are ready to reproduce. When animals reach that point, their bodies are ready to make babies. For plants, maturity means making flowers that make seeds, some of which are enclosed in fruits. In fact, seeds are plant embryos. Seeds are…
