Raised Vegetable Beds

While our fenced in garden is 16 ft by 24 ft, we now have 3 beds that are 6 ft by 4 ft and one of each of the following:  11 ft x 2 1/2 ft,  8 ft x 4 ft and 7 ft by 4 ft.

 When gardening, you need to be flexible.  There are lots of variables that are hard to predict.   While I discussed the changes that we had to make with the perimeter of our garden  in the last blog,  we also had to make several changes to the interior over time.    We built one raised bed initially (see above).  Some of the plants we put directly in the ground and some in the raised bed.  We found that the ground contained clay and sand and retained a lot of water.  The sand was from the pool that we previously had in that location.   As a result some of the plants did not do so well.

We then decided to put three more raised beds and two whiskey barrels.   You can see from the picture above that we were still having trouble with the water. Then we installed a French drain around two sides of the garden to absorb some of the rain running down the driveway which helped a lot (see below).  Now are raised beds are producing bumper crops!