Raised Bed Gardening

Have you always longed for a garden that never had to be tilled? Have you got up at 4am to hoe your garden just to avoid the intense heat of a midsummers day (those mornings when it's maybe 75 degrees in the wee hours of morning, but as soon as that sun pops up the temp climbs within the hour to 95+) or better yet, hoed in the day while mr. sunshine on your shoulders burned you up? Well, I have....I've called around asking someone to come out and till up a place for the garden...then called around some more trying to borrow a tiller....then meticulously planted my seedling, only to have them destroyed by a washout in a rainstorm due to erosion....or eaten from the ground up by voles...Grrrrrr!!!!!!!!! 

Gardening has always been and always will be hard work, but it's very rewarding and I find it to be very relaxing, but I've had bad experiences with the traditional garden, as where I live the soil is mostly mostly clay, and where it's not clay it is sloped so when it rains it washes away most anything you try to plant. I've orded soil before and had it hauled to the house, only to find out it's chock full of every weed imaginable (and i'm not talking about the dandelion ~ i'm talking jimson weed, thistles, cockleburs and all the other lovelies that not only have massive taproots you need a backhoe to dig up, but also have thorns and grow to the size of shrubs) ~ So this year I made it a mission to put in a raised bed or two, as I love container gardening and have always had great luck with planting in flower pots, barrels and anything else that would hold soil! These beds were a lot of work to put in, for the sheer reason that I had to haul the soil myself and for anyone who's carried bags and bags of topsoil, it can get a little daunting ~ especially when it took about 30 bags to full two 4' x 4' square raised beds. I lined the beds on the bottom with landscape fabric, to detour both weeds and critters and made them out of 2 x 12 treated lumber. Although raised beds take a lot of inital labor to get started, they are well worth the effort due to the fact that they are easier to weed (you can pluck any intruder in the bud, any weed growing in a raised bed has started from the top down, not the ground up which makes weeding about 95% faster and easier!) and you know the origions of the soil. I also built a trellis from a recycled handrail that was in our house when we moved in, just staked up with some T posts. The other container beside the garden beds are recycled pallets, lined on the bottom and sides with landscape fabric (just used a staplegun to tack it on) ~ I planted strawberries in one and cabbage, lettuce and spinch in the other ~ this works great for crops that don't require a lot of room for their root structure!