Raised Garden Beds

[GaryD]

Hi,

Here's some raised garden beds from our "lost photos" collection.....


Gary

[Joey]

Hi Gary

Raised garden beds are certainly productive. I recently made a small raised garden bed out of a piece of corflute I had lying around. It is producing a nice crop of corriander. The black colour absorbs the heat well encouraging good growth.


Regards


Joey

[GaryD]

Hi Joey,

Just one of the great things about raised beds is that you can make them out of many materials.

Gary

[GaryD]

Hi,

Our raised beds are cracking along nicely at the moment. We've already harvested zucchini and silver beet (courgettes and Swiss chard for our US friends).

Gary

[Pugo]

really want to start on those before winter here in Taiwan, as that is the time for western vegetables and a raised bed would be just the ticket. for some things that I like to eat like potatoes.

[GaryD]

Hi Pugo,

Autumn, winter and spring are the peak growing seasons in Queensland - we're sub-tropical.

Gary

[GaryD]

Hi,

Our bush tomatoes are going well.

The bushes are supported by two horizontal sections of reinforcing mesh.

Gary

[Pugo]

Tomatoes gone wild..:) looking great.. we will see what happens to mine later..

[GaryD]

Hi,

In the past couple of weeks, we've converted two of our raised bed gardens into wicking worm beds. These beds have always been great places to grow food but they suffered from irregular watering.......or over-watering.

Converting them to wicking beds will extend the watering intervals and will ensure that the plants in the bed never go without water.

I dug all of the growing mix out of the beds and placed a round plastic tub in the empty bed for use as a water reservoir. I loaded drainage sand around the sides of the water reservoir and filled it with large stones.

I used geotextile to cover the water reservoir and I placed a section of 100mm PVC pipe in the middle of the tub (for measuring depth of water and replenishing as necessary).

I then filled the bed with a good potting mix.....and then planted it out.

Photos soon.

Gary

[Shane]

Sure has been plenty of hard work going on at your place recently Gary !!
How long did it take you to convert the two RG beds into Wicking beds?

[GaryD]

Hi Shane,

Once we had everything we needed, each one happened pretty quickly. Digging almost everything out of the raised bed is probably the most arduous part. Once we emptied each bed, it went back together again in no time.

I'm about to embark on the conversion of the third one.

This bed, which we planted out with tomatoes several months ago, is its own argument in support of wicking beds. To say that the tomatoes have grown in questionable circumstances would be a gross understatement.

This bed has been a textbook case of the 'too much or too little (most often too little) water' from the outset.

Anyway, the plants (probably in anticipation of their imminent demise) have produced a nice bucketful of heritage tomatoes.........which Jan plans to turn into green tomato pickle later today.

We'll pull out the tomato bushes and retrofit this third raised bed into a wicking bed garden........and (with hope) plants not having enough water will be a thing of the past.

Notwithstanding our watering neglect, these concrete raised beds have been great vegetable gardening spots. Converting them to wicking beds will address the watering issue so we're expecting big things.

Gary