Our club is considering planting a vegetable garden and donating the food to the local food pantry. Very cool. I was going to use raised beds but no more than 6 inches high as it gets very hot and dry in our area in the middle of the summer and so it might be too hard to keep them from drying out. The deeper the beds are the less often they need to be watered. Water in the top 2-3 inches will dry from evaporation, but below that it won't so it only goes dry as plants use it unless there is an extreme drought in which case it may dry down further. How big a garden would be sufficient to donate, initially, a few hundred pounds of produce. Yikes, I dunno as I never have weighed things. A few hundred pounds sounds like a a lot, but a tomato will weigh much more than a pepper. Rather than worry about how much you have to donate, why not focus instead on the area you and your club can actually handle attending to? Secondly, does anyone find it easier to build the beds first and then dig and amend the soil inside the box, or till the whole area first and then place the boxes, adding more amendments on top of the tilled soil. We have heavy clay. Save yourself a lot of work and don't dig the ground at all. 6" of good growing depth is enough for all the plants you mentioned. They will grow deeper if they wish. You really don't need to do anything at all to the ground under the beds. I have heavy clay and my beds are 8" framed with around 6" of growing depth over the clay. Clay is actually really good for growing things provided it doesn't get compacted or dry out to the point it becomes brick like. Under 6" of growing beds that aren't walked on this won't happen. Lastly, how easy is it to use a raised bed without borders, just mounded soil. Does the bed decrease in size over the summer with soil running off This depends entirely on the rain run off. If the garden is in an area with significant run off you want to frame the beds to prevent run off. If run off isn't a major issue you can just mound the soil and have no frames.

I've been pondering on how to replace the raised beds that I'm currently taking out; the lumber is rotten, and...I guess inhabited by a colony of carpenter ants. Not in a hurry to put any new wood back there. I thought about making new raised beds out of concrete block, but decided that was yukky. (heavy, could be spendy) I'm not ready to commit to anything very permanent anyway, so for this year...my plan is to make temporary raised beds out of the hardwire fencing I've been using to compost. When the texture of the compost gets so fine that it falls out of the wire cage, I line the bins with landscaping fabric, and attach it with zip ties. With the raised beds, my plan is to cut the fabric into strips...to whatever depth I need the dirt to be. I can use lenths of rebar to stake the fencing in place, without bulging too much. Could plant directly in the ground around the bins on the south and west side, to protect them from direct sunlight, to keep the soil cooler. Keeping potted plants there might work too. I'd keep the north and east sides clear, so there's a place to walk...need access with the wheelbarrow, and so on. For composting, I make round bins... But there's no reason they couldn't be bent into rectangles, or whatever shape is needed. When I empty one, I just flip it over and step on it to make it flat again. They slide right under my deck for easy storage. When I bring home a new load of mulch, pine straw, leaves, or whatever...I bend them back into a circle - takes a few minutes. I yank them off the hot piles all the time, dump the contents back in - its a fast way to flip the piles, those bins are easy to move around, very handy. Mine have a green coating, which blends right into the landscape when they are empty. I often run into them when they are like that, I can't even see them... but with landcape fabric around them, navigation is much safer. My roll of fence is 5'feet tall, but its easy to cut with wire cutter...very customizable. I like this idea, because it leaves plenty of options open. At the end of the season, I could pull the bins up...rake everything level, and plant a cover crop there. Could leave them in place, move them over... and ammend the soil when it goes back in. To extend the growing season a little, one might slide lengths of flexible pvc over the rebar to make hoops... cover the whole thing with 6mm plastic, make a mini greenhouse. I'm going to try making double walled bins, and stuff the resulting 'wall' between them with a layer of straw. That should keep the soil cooler in the summer, warmer during the winter. (I'm talking myself into this as I go...can you tell?) The disclaimer is...I don't really know if any of this will work in practice, but it sounds good in theory. Sounds like David has been doing something similar, and he's saying his dirt didn't freeze last winter? That encourages me even more... Maybe the best part, the materials are cheap! In my case, FREE...since I've got everything here already. It might cost me a new roll of landscape fabric, but thats nothing compared to what it would cost to build new beds out of redwood or cedar. Composite, even more spendy. No major committment from me is required, since its all temporary. If I want to try something different next year, I can just flip them over, step on them, and slide them under the deck. And the ants can't set up huge colonies in them, which is always a bonus. Speaking of carving out huge colonies, I better get to sleep if I want to work on this tomorrow. There's snow in the forecast, so there's extra work to do before it shows up. Brick by brick...weather permitting. Leslie in CO

I don't think it would hurt anything. I use wood chips with cardboard underneath to keep the weed and grass growth down. Wood chips are a good mulch for anything, garden included, if you add lots of composted, old manure to the soil first to replace the nitrogen that the wood chips use up. Sometimes it depends on type of tree the wood shavings are from. Don't use walnut anywhere and use dolomite lime with pine/spruce unless you want the extra acid.

There's a lot of variability in "midwest." If you are in zone 7, for example, you might still be able to plant beets, kale, broccoli, cabbage. If you are in zone 6 or 5, Laceyvail's suggestions are good, as are regular radishes. When getting started, it is important to just take it easy and not try to take on too much at once; everything is a learning experience about your location. Most seed packages will have "days to maturity" written somewhere on them. That's the average days from planting to harvest. Some plants can take early frost and some can't.