We spend winter looking forward to warmer days, dreaming of a garden that reflects the beauty in the seed catalogs we pour through. Even while it’s still cold out, the much-awaited time comes for spring planting.
Raised beds
Last year we built a few raised beds for our potatoes and sweet potatoes. While it turned out they would have been better to be deeper, we appreciated their benefits.
This year, we decided to add 10 more raised beds. This time, a little deeper. These beds are 4 feet x 8 feet x 1 foot. We searched around and found a place with a great option for filling them — a combination of clean topsoil, leaf compost, and composted horse manure. It was too far to have it delivered, but a very generous friend used his dump truck and delivered it for us.
The benefits of raised beds? Well, our soil is mostly clay. And while we have been adding compost to it every year, it’s still pretty dense in spots. We’re hoping this will help provide looser soil to give our various root veggies an easier time fully developing and us an easier time harvesting. We’re also hoping this will help cut down on the weeds that tend to encroach on the garden beds. Overall, we’re hoping for a more productive garden.
Why didn’t we just go ahead and fill the garden with raised beds? Frankly, they’re expensive to fill. So, a little at a time.
What’s in our spring planting?
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