Are you searching for the perfect backyard vegetable garden? Do you have the room or the time? A raised vegetable garden just might be the answer. You will find it inexpensive and easy to create.
Choosing a raised vegetable garden can be difficult and seem expensive. However, you will find out that not only is it inexpensive but you get great vegetables that taste amazing. You won’t have to wonder about bad soil in your garden because it remains protected. This produces wonderful and tasty vegetables.
Still not sure if raised vegetable garden is the right choice? Take a peek at some benefits.
Soil Means Everything For Wonderful Crops
Inspect the dirt in your backyard and you will find that it is sandy, full of rock or starved of nutrients. Maybe even too much clay. This type of soil will not provide you with great vegetables.
Using a raised vegetable garden makes it easier to contain your vegetable garden. Some crops can take over your garden once they sprout. Others will spread such as mint and strawberries. Having a wall around your garden contains them. Also, raised bed vegetable garden soil remains loose and not compacted by walking or siting on the soil. This allows for the soil to breathe. Your raised garden helps to protect your vegetables from pest as well.
Your Back Will Thank You
Everyone soon discovers a raised vegetable garden is easier on your back. We all love working on our garden but leaning over can strain our backs. Having your garden elevated removes sore backs and allows you to enjoy your vegetable garden. Caring for your garden because much easier.
Elderly garden lovers truly benefit from a raised vegetable garden.
After reviewing these brief benefits you can see it is the most popular choice for any backyard garden. I am certain you will love your raised vegetable garden. Start your garden today!
Testing your own soil to ensure you have the correct nutrients and type of soil is easy to do. Taking the time to test your raised vegetable garden soil before you start planting will help you to avoid future disappointments. If you are building a raised vegetable garden in your backyard and you live in a newly developed track home chances are you will need to obtain good soil from a gardening center or local farm.
There are three essential types of soil. These soils are sandy soil, clay soil and luxurious loam. The soil you want is luxurious loam for your raised garden. to test your soil take a handful of the damp soil and squeeze it in your hand. If the soil immediately crumbles then this is sandy soil. If the soil holds it shape even when you poke it with your finger you have clay soil. The best soil is when you squeeze it and it holds its shape but after poking the soil it crumbles. This is luxurious loam soil.
If you do have luxurious loam soil you want to see if earthworms are already living there. If so, this means you have microbes and bacteria which is beneficial to your new raised vegetable garden. The earthworms will stick around helping the drainage and supplying rich nutrients from earthworm castings.
Next you want to test if you have drainage. To do this dig a small hole about a foot wide and foot deep. Pour water in the hole and let drain. Do this again a second time. If it takes longer then four hours then you have a drainage problem and this is more likely because you have the wrong soil.
The Ph tests the acidity in your soil. This has a huge part in how your vegetables grow. Ph levels are test from 0-14. Zero means extremely acidic and fourteen means lots of alkaline. Plants thrive in a perfect balance between 6-8 Ph level. Refer to this Ph level chart for more details on Ph levels. Most garden centers carry a Ph tester and it is simple to use. Make sure to follow the instructions to get the correct results.
In summary there are four main components to testing your raised vegetable garden soil:
If you have an organic vegetable garden you are well aware of the insects that harm your crops. Just as there are bad insects there are good insects too. These good insects help to eliminate the harmful insects in your raised vegetable garden. There are some insects that are neither harmful or beneficial as well. Let’s take a look at the different good garden insects.
Beneficial Garden Insects:
Ladybugs – Feed on aphids, insect eggs and mites
Lacewings – Eat aphids, insect eggs and mites
Praying Mantids – Eat many insects (we have several in our garden)
Predatory Mites – Eat spider mites
Ambush Bugs – Eat any insect they can capture
Ground Beetles – Eat caterpillars, cutworms and army worms
Tachnid Flies – Eat many different kinds of larvae
You can purchase most of these insects for your raised vegetable garden either online or at your local gardening center.
Some bugs are mobile and might not stay so if you are purchasing ladybugs for example you should first lightly water your vegetable garden and then release them right at sunset. This will encourage the ladybugs to settle in for the night and mostly make your organic vegetable garden their new home.
This is a great short video on raised vegetable garden design and building. It covers equipment used to create your garden and covers some materials used to raise your vegetable garden. Great tips!
Worms provide many functions for a raised vegetable garden. Earthworms can loosen the soil and create irregation for drainage. There is another function of the earthworm that is important too, enriching soil. Earthworms have an amazing way of processing peat through its digestive system adding nutrients to the soil. This increases your vegetable plant growth.
What Are Worm Castings?
Earthworm castings provide all natural and organic nutrients to your soil. This is a terrific organic fertilizer. Worm castings also can aid in insect pest control because worms produce enzymes.
How Do You Get Them?
There are many ways to get earthworms and worm castings. You can buy them online or at your local gardening center or you can grow them yourself. Raising your own earthworms is also known as vermiculture. The end product is called worm manure, castings or compost. Either way it is an organic fertilizer with rich nutrients for your vegetable plants.
How Do You Apply Worm Castings?
The easiest and effective way to apply the castings is on the top soil along the rows of your vegetables. After you apply the castings you can water lightly and let the worm castings slowly work its way through your raised vegetable garden soil.
There are many kinds of materials you can use to build your raised vegetable garden. These include stone, rocks, cinder blocks, redwood posts, 8×10 pine, etc. However, I’ve heard of some gardeners asking about railroad ties also known as railway sleepers. I see the idea. It is a way to recycle huge pieces of wood and they are often inexpensive or even free.
The Problem With Railroad Ties
One big concern is the chemicals used to preserve the wood. These chemicals will leach into your vegetable garden’s soil. One of the major chemical components in railroad ties is creosote. Creosote is arsenic which means your vegetables might survive the poison but it will harm you. Other countries might have chemical free railway sleepers and in this case there is no concern.
Bottom line, stay away from railroad ties in all edible gardens. Why risk it? An alternative to railroad ties for your raised vegetable garden is landscape timber. This has the same dimensions but not treated with any chemicals. Caution: Be sure to ask before your purchase the landscape timber if it has been treated at all.
The beginning of your raised vegetable garden is bliss. Pest control for the first year is minimal. However, over time gophers and other wild life find out about this garden heaven and move in. There are several remedies to having your pests move out of your raised vegetable garden. What will work for you?
Home remedies are fine but pests over time will just learn to live with it. In my case poisons are not an option! They pollute the environment and our wonderful vegetables. The best way to attack this problem is with physical barriers. Half inch thick hardware clothe lining under the raised vegetable garden and on the sides will provide a safe and effect method of fighting off pests. This will even keep mice out of your raised vegetable garden.
Building a raised vegetable garden is by far the only method I use to protect my crop from rabbits, mice, gophers and other wildlife.
You can also protect it from above by extending one inch chicken wire over your raised vegetable garden. If you have melons plastic net bags do the trick. Melons can grow to full size in a net bag and stay protected.
I hope you found these tips helpful. Keep in mind these are only a few and I hope you have wonderful success with your raised vegetable garden.
Compost is the most inexpensive and conservative way to make fertilizer for your garden. Since you are building a raised vegetable garden you have control over what you put in your soil. As discussed in our organic fertilizer article your soil can not always provide what your plants need. Save yourself money and recycle common kitchen waste at the same time.
How Composting Works
Bacteria breaks down natural organic matter in your heap. When this breaking down occurs the organic matter releases nutrients like phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium. This rotting in the compost heap creates heat making the compost break down more efficient. Your compost which was garbage to start becomes essential nutrients to grow more food. Amazing really!
Compost Mix
To get a good compost mixture I like to keep it simple. Remember you need about 30 times more carbon then nitrogen. Nitrogen includes grass clippings, manure, kitchen scraps and green plants. Carbon includes leaves, wood branches, paper, saw dust.
What Are Kitchen Scraps?
These are scraps you find in the kitchen that you would normally through away. This includes vegetables, grains, fruit rinds, tea bags, egg shells, coffee grinds and filters also bread. Do not include meat, fish, cheese or butter.
Compost Bins
I prefer the wooden bin with no bottom. Make sure you have two bins so you can continue to fill another while one is full. You can purchase a plastic one too. These are often black to help with the heating process and the sides come apart so you can remove your compost later. If you are building your compost over a few weeks time you should turn the compost once it is full to start the rotting process. Use an activator like blood or manure to speed up the process.
I hope this was helpful and let me know what you use for a great compost. Happy gardening.
There is no mistake that going green is top of mind with just about everyone in the nation. With the Obamas growing their own organic garden in the White House to celebrities hiring gardeners to build organic raised vegetable gardens.
The single most important piece of an organic garden is the soil. However, often times your vegetables will not get the proper nutrients it needs to survive from soil alone. Your plants need three major nutrients and they are phosphorus, potassium and nitrogen. There are some other components like magnesium, zinc, copper, iron, sulfur and calcium.
Why Use Organic Fertilizers?
Organic fertilizers in your raised vegetable garden release nutrients slowly over time. Also the materials of organic fertilizer end up as a wonderful texture to your soil. After you harvest your crop you can simply turn over your soil to incorporate left over vegetables and organic fertilizer to re-use the soil. This is an effect soil recycling system. This creates a compost naturally.
A Definition of Organic Fertilizer
To call these components of nutrients organic they must be natural in nature. These include manure, green sand, rock phosphate or bone meal. Whereas synthetic fertilizers are man made materials and considered chemicals.
What Organic Fertilizer Do You Use?
It’s important to know what types of organic fertilizers provide as nutrients. As an example cow manure contains all the essentials including potassium, phosphorus, nitrogen and other organic matter. You can use this directly on vegetable plants. Dry or powdered seaweed contains all the same as manure but also include iron and zinc.
In short this topic is always a great debate starter among organic farmers. The goal is to not contaminate your vegetables with man made chemicals.
Please let me know how you fertilize your garden. Happy gardening.
Organic methods of pest control are easy and inexpensive. Why spray chemicals on your perfectly healthy creations from nature? Organic gardening is becoming more and more popular and organic pest control is more common in the backyard. After all, I want to eat my vegetables when harvest time comes around. Don’t you?
I’m only going to talk about two of the most common pests in your raised vegetable garden.
Snails
The first little pest is snails. Snails are large and easy to spot but I don’t like spending parts of my evening picking them out with a flashlight so I turn to other tactics. My first approach is egg shells around the raised vegetable garden. These egg shells should be clean to keep other animals from smelling the eggs and moving in too. Snails do not like egg shells and this creates a perfect barrier around your raised vegetable garden. If you rather not deal with egg shells you can use sand as well. I have crushed marble that is pure white and very clean.
Another idea for snails in your raised vegetable garden are beer pans. The snails are attracted to the smell, crawl inside and drown. This method requires you to replace the beer every few days for freshness.
Aphids
Ladybugs are hands down the best way to naturally rid your raised vegetable garden of these pests. The biggest trick is keeping them around. A good idea is to lightly spray your garden with water just as the sun sets and release the ladybugs. Ladybugs don’t like to venture out at night and if you provide them water and aphids they just might call your raised vegetable garden home. Ladybugs also like pollen as well. So make sure the raised vegetable garden has some dill or wild carrot. Did you know a single ladybug can eat over 5,000 aphids in its lifetime? You can purchase ladybugs at your local hardware store or online.
Please leave a comment and let me know what has worked for you. Happy gardening.
Bill Williams:
Great article. We buy our worm castings from a local farmer's market. Nice to try and buy local because the nutrients remains the same for your plants
Are you searching for the perfect backyard vegetable garden? Do you have the room or the time? A raised vegetable garden just might be the answer. You will find it inexpensive and easy to create.
There are three essential types of soil. These soils are sandy soil, clay soil and luxurious loam. The soil you want is luxurious loam for your raised garden. to test your soil take a handful of the damp soil and squeeze it in your hand. If the soil immediately crumbles then this is sandy soil. If the soil holds it shape even when you poke it with your finger you have clay soil. The best soil is when you squeeze it and it holds its shape but after poking the soil it crumbles. This is luxurious loam soil.
Beneficial Garden Insects:
There is no mistake that going green is top of mind with just about everyone in the nation. With the Obamas growing their own organic garden in the White House to celebrities hiring gardeners to build organic raised vegetable gardens.