Throughout this season, I’ll be giving you tips directly from the Botanical Interests test gardens: a plot of raised herb and vegetable beds and a wide swath of annual and perennial flower plantings in our garden about 30 miles northwest of Denver, Colorado. I hope you will find some helpful tips to apply in your own garden.

My friends often ask me how they should lay out their raised vegetable garden beds.

I always tell them, “Remember the wheelbarrow!” When laying out your garden beds, be sure to leave a 3-foot main path down the middle and a 3-foot access path on at least one side of each bed, so you can get in and out easily with a wheelbarrow. Make sure you also have room to turn the corners between paths with the wheelbarrow. I use raised beds for a few reasons. They have warmer soil, allowing you to plant earlier in spring, they make maintaining the pathways easier, and they make it easy to break your garden chores into small goals. If you have a short season like we do here in Colorado, you know that all of a sudden, you have a lot to do when spring hits. If you’re like me, it’s easy to overdo it and feel like there’s more to do than you have time to accomplish. With the raised beds, it’s much easier to break your garden tasks into smaller components and not feel like your have to do everything all at once.

This year, I’m trying a new method of ‘year round’ mulching:

In the fall, we raked leaves into piles, then ran the lawn mower over them. I layered 4″-6″ of this mulch over the top of each raised bed at the end of the season. This ‘tucked’ the bed in for the winter and helped to preserve the soil’s vitality. It is also an easy method of direct composting. When you are ready to plant in the spring, simply push aside the mulch to sow seeds. Don’t worry about leaving the beds a little ‘messy’ with the leaf/grass mulch throughout the summer. Bare soil dries out faster, leaches nutrients, and provides a welcome sign for weeds. Keeping soil covered will retain moisture and lower the maintenance requirements. The mulch is also beneficial to earthworms who love to live under this moist nutritious layer. They will thank you for your hospitality by aerating the soil and providing worm castings that provide rich nutrients for your plants. Earwigs and sow bugs (not as welcome as the earthworms, but part of nature’s great recycling team) tend to prefer to eat the decomposing material. As summer goes on, most of your mulch breaks down to enrich the soil. Our lawn produces a lot of mulch. Instead of hauling it away (what a waste!), we use it to cover the raised bed walkways. At the end of the summer, I rake that up and layer it in the beds too.

My first spring crops were planted last fall:

Visitors to our garden in early April are amazed to see lots of things already growing and ready for harvest! My fall sowing of Mustard Ruby Streaks, spinach, carrots, and green onions has provided an early bounty of salad material in early spring. You can either sow these cool season plants in late fall, so they’ll germinate early in spring. Or, in milder climates, sow earlier and over winter the plants with a layer of mulch or in a cold frame.

Until next time,

Happy Gardening!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 23rd, 2010 at 11:44 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.