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A Free Solution For Raised Bed Gardens
A Free Solution For Raised Bed Gardens
As concerns about interruptions in the supply chain due to the pandemic hit the news, Victory Gardens are once again becoming popular. This is great news!
Building a garden infrastructure can be expensive, especially for those in urban or suburban environments where open space is limited. If you start pricing boards for building raised beds, for example, you’re likely to come away shaking your head in disbelief.
Surely there is some inexpensive way to establish a viable garden?
There is. I’m here to tell you about an excellent free resource for raised bed gardening which nearly everyone ignores because of a powerful but incorrect urban myth about the dangers. I refer to gardening in tires. Yes, tires. Car tires, truck tires, tractor tires…you name it. And, these can be used tires!
Why Tires?
When we moved to our rural homestead seventeen years ago, we thought it would be a simple matter to establish a garden. After all, how hard could it be? Plow, plant, water, and voilà: Food security.
We were wrong. We hadn’t factored in the heavy clay soil, pests ranging from deer to voles, and especially the tough prairie grasses. Every year we found our vegetables overwhelmed with weeds and baked into hard clay. No one who hasn’t experienced prairie grasses has any idea how pervasive, stubborn, and overwhelming those grasses can be. Since we didn’t have a tractor, our attempt to keep a half-acre garden weed-free was impossible.
For nine years, we struggled to plant in the ground, and for nine years, we failed. We tilled in compost and mulched. We pulled weeds, and we pulled more weeds. When it looked like we might succeed with a modest patch of beans or peas, the deer would invade, or the voles would dig things up (or an early frost would hit), and that would be the end of that.
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Raised Garden Beds in the Bush–Growing Your Own Food in Poor Soil Conditions
RAISED GARDEN BEDS IN THE BUSH – GROWING YOUR OWN FOOD IN POOR SOIL CONDITIONS
When we moved to our bush property two years ago self-sufficiency was high on the agenda. We wanted to produce our own electricity, collect rainwater and we certainly wanted to grow some or if possible most of our own food. This included an abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables and we both envisaged a fairly large space for vegetables, berries and flowers intermingled in a lush, productive garden. But for the time being, while we were building a house and joinery workshop, we had to be content with a single ‘temporary’ garden bed so we could start growing some fresh greens. The bed was constructed with two curved, 5m long zincalume sheets that were left over from our roof installation. We screwed the two sheets together at the ends to form an elliptical shaped bed 0.9m high. Working the bed at this height – sowing, planting, mulching, harvesting and pest control – has been extremely convenient and the ‘temporary’ bed turned out to be a great success and supplied us with an abundance of food.
The following spring we added a second, rectangular bed made of other scavenged sheets to accommodate some tomato and zucchini plants. Once you have started to grow your own food you never really grow enough or have enough space. There is always another variety that should be added to the mix. The second raised bed planted with zucchini and tomato plants is pictured in the image at the beginning of the article. The long sheets were not supported and the beds started to budge when they were filled with compost.
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