preventing weeds/vegetation between raised garden beds
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Raised Beds for Vegetable Garden
Comments (5)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....See MoreGrass in Raised Bed Vegetable Garden
Comments (5)what AJBB already stated: ELBOW GREASE ... those grass killers will kill your veggies ... when prepping this fall for our second season, dig up the beds and lay newspaper down on top of the landscape fabric then add back the soil ... you can also prep future beds by laying thick BLACK plastic over the top of the beds for a few months over the summer, this will kill off all remaining grass/weed seeds as the heat builds up, like hot composting ......See MoreGroundcover for between raised vegetable beds?
Comments (3)Hi Sweetbrat, All the clovers I know of spread, some of them invasively, so be really careful if you decide to go that way. Being a vegetable garden, I assume this is a very sunny spot!!? You might want to try one of the creeping thymes, Thymus praecox. They only get a couple inches high, have tiny, tiny leaves, and have tiny flowers that range from white to light pink to deep pink. The one I like best is T.p. 'Coccineus', Red Mother of Thyme with bright rosy-pink flowers.They can tolerate some foot traffic, but not constantly. The toughest one, the one that will tolerate the most foot traffic, is T.p. 'Pseudolanuginosus', Woolly Thyme. It has lavender-pink flowers and the tiny leaves are kind of fuzzy. The foliage is grayer than the others. If there are places where you walk often, as I suspect you must do when tending the vegetables, I'd suggest you put fairly widely spaced stepping stones in and plant the thymes all around and between them. Creeping thyme is one of the most popular "patio stuffers," used by a lot of people to plant between bricks or stones on patios and walkways. It will start to grow over the stones and you can either leave it go or trim it back if you like the look better. Compared to mowing and trimming grass, it will require very little upkeep. You might want to shear the top off after it's done blooming to keep it neat looking, and possibly another time or two over summer. If you decide to do it, rather than getting a few big plants and spacing them far apart, they will usually grow together faster if you get small plants (2" pots should work well) and space them closer together. Be sure you get all the grass and any weeds out before you plant since it will be much harder to weed out after the thyme is in and spreading. Thyme spreads only on the surface and is very controllable. Happy veggie gardening, Skybird...See MoreHow do you deal with weeds between beds in your veggie garden?
Comments (16)To clarify, I do hand weed IN the beds, this is just for around the beds. I only got some of the paths mulched before summer hit and the weeds went crazy. So the side of the garden where I got the mulch in has some weeds, but not a lot. The other side...the weeds are rivaling the okra in height. And the okra is doing great. I already tried glyphosate, but it didn't do much. It was 41% though, not the 47%. I will get some ammonium phosphate too. Once the weeds are beat down a bit I will cover and mulch the rest so hopefully this doesn't happen again!...See MoreL A
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