from what i see i'd say not enough mulch at least, eg.,. spoilt hay or sugarcane mulches etc.,. should be covering the beds and over the paths,

all i can suggest is look at our presentations there may be some help to found there?

if you can access it use spent mushroom compost from the mushroom farm, great stuff.

we are currently creating beds at our new place these will have corrugated roofing as their sides, 6 meters long and 1 meter wide, can't afford mushy compost so going with our clay loam top soil and heaps of gypsum and a tad of dolomite, with our kitchen scraps mixed in, plants all look healthy.

take care

len

Here is a link that might be useful: lens straw bale garden

I'm in MA. I lost two levels of tomato flowers in the July heat, so all my early tomatoes are long harvested, and the fruit that set from the second, later flowering is just coming along now. My peppers also went to sleep during the heat, and now have a great set of fruit after not much production for a few weeks. Other than that, I did OK but not great. The heat was a strain on the carrots and beets.

Well-finished compost is about 1-1-1 in N-P-K, so you should really be getting more fertilizer into the soil - especially after a few years of planting in the same soil. Corn is a very heavy feeder - small plants is either not enough fertilizer or not enough water. Raised beds dry out faster than base soil, so that's a big issue as well.

My gut guess from your photo is that the raised beds are highly vulnerable to getting extremely dry, so the very dry summer made it so watering could not keep up with evaporation and transpiration. The soil looks on the sandy side, in which case that is very likely the problem.

I have sandy soil and have learned to avoid raised beds for the most part, unless they are very heavily amended with OM to hold moisture and still drying can be a problem.

Yes, cherry toms are greatly tougher in all ways to other types.

I've copied and pasted your comments and questions. I agree, it was a different year and I am just now realizing that I should have watered more.

Peas: excellent because they were 'done' before the rainless summer hit.
-Agreed. Had a great crop.

Summer Squash, Zucchini, cukes and scallop squash: Shocked at these. Every year I plant crookneck and early prolific straightneck, and every year I have literally 10-20lb harvest about twice a week for about a month. This year, however, I couldn't even keep the plants from dying! Four (4) rounds of plantings (~ 4-5 hills each round) just up and DIED. I got ZERO (0) fruits. Cukes I planted 2 rounds- dead.
- I thought I did a lot better job keeping up the bug battle. Plants started off great UNDER a fabric covered low tunnel so the striped cucumber beetles didn't get them. I scraped eggs into soapy water, etc. But I didn't get nearly as much squash as usual. In comparing notes with a gardener in western MA and one near Montpelier VT, they watered a lot more than I did. In fact, I think I stopped watering the zukes once they started producing. Big mistake.

Tomatoes: the usual: great until August, then blight. Funny thing was, cherry toms were unaffected. Just the bigger varieties got hit.
- I think I got bacteria speck not blight. Two beds are just about leafless and it seemed to travel west to east. A third bed in a different location with mostly cherry tomatoes doesn't look nearly as bad. I'm not sure how to handle this next year.

Corn: stalks no higher than ~4 feet, and dried out or under-developed cobs.
- We just buy ours at the farmstand.

Green beans: Did "ok" but not as well as I'd have liked.
- I think I kept watering the beans more. Crops are fine but don't seem to taste as good as last year. Tried a yellow filet that was tasteless. I think the green filet was taverna. I have a new crop of romano just starting to produce now. Another crop of bush beans in flower right now. Will probably need frost protection in another week. We get hit early but if I can keep them going (fabric tunnel) I'll get a late crop. I think the beans accidentally got more water because near them I was starting new seeds of something so they got watered too.

Spinach: what was up with THIS one?! Again, nothing to show for what is typically a very successful crop. What little actually showed up didn't even grow big enough to take one cutting before bolting.
- I got braggy about my spinach. Put in a late crop last year Tyee and let it winter over. I think we picked spinach in March. I have a late crop growing now but it should be getting watered more. I have to get spinach planted in early April to get a good crop. See manure info.

Beets, Cauli and Cabbage: Cabbage actually showed up long about a week ago, but Beets & Cauli were foliage only.
- Don't grow cauli. Cabbage is a napa variety in a location that doesn't get full sun. Mostly neglected. Not great but not bad for the amount of neglect. Beets I work hard at but I noticed last night that I'm running out of red beets. Sure, I didn't plant as many but this time last year they spring crop was huge (but not woody). Again, I don't think I watered enough. I have a later crop of gold beets that got special care because they never seem to do well for me but we think they are sweeter.

Onions did ok- I do have decent success with onions. And the potatoes were new to me this year, and did "ok."
- I only planted a few red onions and they look pretty good. I'm still working on onion growing skills. I have them among my pepper plants. It's a fantastic year for peppers.

I rotate everything every year in a 25 x 50' space. So the same crop doesn't hit the same spot only every 4 years.

I usually cover w/black plastic- didn't this year, but haven't had THIS bad of failure ever.

I don't fertilize other than tossing on a fresh pile of compost and roto-tilling it in both in the fall & spring. I build raised beds every year.

Anyone have any tips other than "it was just too damned hot all summer?" Cuz I'm willing to chalk it all up to that :)
- I use the lasagna bed system starting off with layers of wet newspaper and alternating leaves, fresh grass clippings, wood ashes, kitchen scraps etc. The top layer is composted horse manure that I originally located via craigslist. The guy adds kitchen scraps to the pile and mixes it with his tractor It's really nice and we just pay him something like $15 to load our utility trailer. The year I planted spinach before adding the spring composted manure, the spinach looked pretty good ... but another patch planted a few weeks later after the manure application was much bigger. I use steer manure when I have to because it's free but I don't think it is nearly as good. The only composted manure I've seen that I liked better than the horse manure is composted buffalo manure from the place in warner nh. It was black and gorgeous.

I'm also a fan of fish fertilizer. All transplants get doused with it. I will also fertilize again about 2 weeks later and any time something doesn't look like it's thriving.

Every soil and location is different. In parts of our yard, the water table is quite high. There's a seasonal stream and across from that it can be marshy much of the year. My husband was able to mow in July instead of waiting until August because it was that dry this year. I only watered on weekends and sometimes in between if things weren't looking good. There are plenty of places that right now are like powder. A perennial bed near the stream area isn't too bad, more like normal soil but this is a spot that in the spring will be too wet to work on. The lawn will be sodden.

I also grow garlic so I was carefully to keep that watered. I add an organic fertilizer before planting because it's also a heavy feeder. I noticed some of the bulbs at the ends of the row were much smaller so I probably wasn't careful with the fertilizer and water. I don't have raised beds per se (when first built, a lasagna bed is about 18" high but compacts by half the first winter) but I plant in beds. Between the beds are mostly grass paths wide enough for the riding lawn mower. But I also have some narrow alternating pathways that I layer with newspapers covered with grass clippings to keep the weeds down. Next year, that composted material might get shoveled onto the bed or become a bed. Keep in mind, the lawn area can suck up moisture. The bed closest to a mature maple although not close to the canopy area shows a big different in growth. At the end farthest from the tree, the romano beans are at least 18-24" tall but nearest the tree, maybe 12-18". I think the tree is getting the moisture.

Sometimes I edge a row with newspapers and grass clippings but I usually don't have enough time.

I'm not a fan of black plastic during the growing season. I have a good hand weeder and I seem to like to weed. If you plant close enough like Square Foot Gardening, once plants get big enough, they seem to do a good job shading out the weeds.

The photo makes your garden look distant from the house which is what ours is. This year my husband built a high tunnel and to get water to it, dug a trench and put in a yard hydrant. Having a hose faucet closer to the garden has made watering easier. But I still should have done it more often.

Pn brown has it spot on, your beds look like what someone would make in preparation for a flood year, the raised beds there increase the surface area of the soil, meaning more sides to get heated from sunlight and drying out from evaporation. raised beds or planting holes, especially with unbound sides like that will lead to a drier soil.

In a wet year that is exactly what you will want, your plants will not suffer from overwatering or too much rain. With that set up, during a normal or dry year - you would have had to water at least twice the normal inch per week.

If you keep the same bed structure, you should mulch with hay, grass clippings, newspaper, ANYTHING to keep the sun off the soil, as deeply as you can to retain moisture, and water an inch and a half to two inches per week, as measured by a rain gauge or two if using a sprinkler.

Sorry you had such a poor veg harvest this yr! I don't know how hot and dry you might have been up there in NH, but if you were about as hot as we were here in PA, it just wasn't a good yr for backyard veggie gardeners! I lost my cukes, too, toward about the 3rd wk of July, either due to cuke beetles or the extreme heat. From what I have heard from my more seasoned and experienced Amish neighbors, it was so daggone hot and dry there for the 1st half of the growing season, not enough natural rain storms and especially the tstorms, that all the watering didn't do much at least for the cuke crops! My tomatoes did well this yr, as they like the dry but not extreme heat. Our weather did finally break and change toward the end of July and we started getting more normal weather here -- a lot of good make up rains and some good tstorms but a bit too late for some things. Pumpkins came in too early and too fast for most folks. My squash did so-so! It was a tough yr I think for everyone. You probably should have fertilized your corn and your other plants when first planted at least!
Herbs did great this yr! Could also have been the critters and bugs after your produce, too. Just an awful season!

Just looked again at your picture up there! Looks like you didn't get enough sun, either! How much sunlight does your spot there get in the peak of the season? I get some shade on my beds, too. But I get at least 8 to 9 hrs of sunlight in the mid summer! How long have you been using the same beds? I also put some mulch on my raised beds but not real heavy -- just a light layer!

The garden is in full sun all day; it's a field. The pic was taken at 7am from the west-side of the garden. Sun comes up in upper-left corner. House is ~40 feet off the right (south) side of the pic. There is no shade. Soil is actually not sandy at all, must be the lighting. Thanks for the tips; I never would have realized that compost had little to offer in terms of soil nutrients- bummer. And I'll use that hose on the right more.

It's getting to be a chore to dig the raised beds each year, they are never the same. These will be rototilled over soon, flattened out, and the garden will sit until spring. The beds are about 8-10" tall, and I decide on the "design" as I go along. It keeps me busy for about 2 days in the spring. I originally started doing it because it was more 'fun' to have little sections of this and that with pathways, but I can see that it's not necessarily the best method after this year. I had already planned to 'probably not' do it next year.

And what about a winter cover crop? I've never used one, so I'll have to do some homework.

Thanks again for the feedback.

Raised beds warm up earlier in the spring in NH - that's a good thing. And the worked soil will be nice and loose - also a good thing. The only problem is the watering, which can be dealt with by mulching. I"d go with black plastic for tomatoes, peppers, squash, etc. And don't crowd your plants - the more space you allow each plant, the more drought tolerant they are. Nothing wrong with raised beds - many farms use raised rows now for veggies.

We don't rototill. Some gardeners think it ruins the soil structure. The way you do beds, if you aren't walking on them a lot, the soil stays pretty soft. Weeds are easy to pull. I do have a problem with a creeping weed (scalloped shaped leaves) and horrible grasses with spreading roots (we call it witch grass) so sometimes a bed gets infested during the growing season. In the spring, very early, I'll put black plastic over the bed and that suffocates the bad creeping weed. It's then easy to rake off most of it. I use a spading fork for anything that's compacted or for a large mound of weedy grass. I tried to do better this year with hand weeding. I use something similar to a cobra head weeder.
How's the worm population in your soil?

I disagree, Jon. In quite sandy soil, raised beds really are a problem. Mulching will not suffice to keep the soil moist in mid-summer without a lot of rain. Warming in spring with sandy soil is easily achieved by baring the soil for a week or so, raised bed not needed.

However, the OP says the soil is not sandy in this case. Even so, from looking at the photo, I think soil dryness was likely the issue because of the way the beds are made.