We have two 40-foot x 40-foot garden beds cleared on the hillside where we have our annual vegetable garden. This year we decided to install raised beds. There were a number of reasons for this, but the big one is that when gardening on a hillside, everything wants to slide downhill… our garden beds have slid downhill almost a foot a year!

Our plan is to have raised beds filling both garden plots, but we knew this wasn’t going to happen this year. And this project is still taking longer to build than initially planned… pretty much like every other project on the farm!

We’ve only installed five raised beds so far… you can see this in the photo above. You can also see our garlic, shallots, and elephant garlic in the foreground; they are growing great, but the elephant garlic on the far right has some scapes we need to prune.

In our other 40-foot x 40-foot garden plot, we are installing quick, straw raised beds. Planting directly into straw bales works very well… we’ve done this, and I like it. But you have to condition the straw, and this takes more time than I wanted to wait.

But we had another idea: use the straw bales as walls for a “raised” bed. We placed 6 straw bales in a rectangle with an open area in the middle where we placed compost for planting.

We dumped a few buckets of composted litter from our poultry brooder. We have used this brooder for the past 4 years with great success, and a lot of compost has been created from the deep bed of litter we create.

On top of the composted poultry litter, we added mushroom compost from a local compost and soil company.

We will be planting melons, squash, and cucumbers into these beds. There are a number of benefits from this set up:

• The beds are not filled all the way to the top edge to protect the young plants from the wind… we can get some heavy wind in this area.
• The raised edges will let us cover the seedlings with nursery cloth to cut down on pests when the plants are young and more vulnerable.
• The straw will leech nutrient every time it rains. The mushroom compost is rich. The poultry litter compost is extremely rich. The melons and squash are heavy feeders, so all this nitrogen should be great.