Last year, I told my husband that our vegetable garden was getting too big for me to take care of. Then, over the winter he fell for an infomercial and bought a high-powered blender that combines various greens and fruits into a very healthy drink. He asked me to grow a lot more greens this year. So we made the garden even bigger!
We began by laying big pieces of cardboard over the lawn where the extended garden would be. When we ran out of cardboard, we used layers of newspaper. Cardboard and newspaper smothers the grass and eventually decomposes. We found cinder blocks on Craig’s List for a dollar a piece and laid them on the cardboard in a rectangle of eleven on each side and two on each end to make the easiest raised beds ever.
Fifteen yards of top soil was way more than we needed, but that was the minimum order for delivery. That’s okay though – I like to have a pile of spare top soil to go along with my wood chip pile and my rock pile. You never know when you’re going to need these things!
I put a layer of pine needles on the bottom of each of the raised beds – you guessed it, I have a stash of garbage bags full of pine needles, just in case. Then we filled the beds with topsoil. I covered the 30-inch paths between the beds with wood chips.
Planting those raised beds was so easy! You wouldn’t think raising the soil just 8 inches would make much of a difference, but it really does. So much easier on the back!
I didn’t know which plants would work best in the raised beds, or how good the purchased soil was, so I planted half of each crop in the new raised beds and the other half in the older part of the garden where I’ve been improving the soil for years with compost and shredded leaves.
At first, nothing grew. Not even a weed. I was afraid I had purchased sterile soil that perhaps had been treated with herbicide. But eventually the weeds from the farm where the soil originated began to germinate and so did my seeds. Weeding was easy sitting on the cinder blocks.
I found that some crops worked much better than others inside the cinder blocks. Zinnias, carrots, kohlrabi and tomatoes did wonderfully, while radishes, potatoes and turnips didn’t do so well. At this point, I don’t know if that’s because of poor soil quality or the heat and faster drainage inside the blocks. As I improve the soil over the next few years, I’ll be able to answer that question.
I even planted in the small holes in the cinder blocks. I found that marigolds do astonishingly well, as do Swiss chard, romaine lettuce and endive. The small, hot space wasn’t suited to spinach, nasturtiums or bok choy.
This all worked out so well that we may add a couple more raised beds next year!
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