Raised bed gardening Archives - Coming Home to Eden

Strawberries

Posted on September 7, 2022September 7, 2022 by ginamcmanig

Who doesn’t love strawberries? We eat fairly seasonally here so each new thing is exciting! We have planted strawberries in the past and have not had a great experience. Today, I will talk about how and why we grow strawberries the way we do now. Let’s go back in time shall we…it was 1973… just kidding. I wasn’t born yet. Okay, around 6 years ago we readied 3 long beds for strawberries. I marked them and my husband tilled and tilled and tilled. Our soil here is boney as they call it. That means there are lots of rocks. Some are very large. In these parts we need what is called a rear tine tiller. Our friends kindly lent us theirs. If you are not sure what a tiller does, it basically chops up the grass weeds and loosens the soil for planting. The rows were a couple of feet wide by I am not sure how long…maybe 30 or 40 feet? We planted a few different varieties. The strawberries filled in with weeds before long. We had mulched them with hay. That was a bad idea. Hay contains seeds and seeds sprout. It was a big fat mess. Besides the hay seeds and other seeds that are airborne that land and grow, there are some plant roots that are extremely hardy. Plants can grow back from the roots especially when growing with this method. We still keep one long bed (a different one) with strawberries directly in the ground. We have a couple of hundred berries in and around a bed with gooseberries, blueberries, and currants. We do mulch this bed with sawdust and wood chips but it still fills in pretty quickly with weeds. This bed was kind of an overflow area for extra strawberry plants. I figured they would be a good fit for around the other berries. We already mulched the row. It was easy to pop some plants in between the bushes. This bed is harder to maintain. The weeds not only come if from above but also below. They are spread everywhere by seed but also in a bed like this from underneath via roots. Every year we deal with this. Now if you are planting just one little bed of strawberries, it may be no big deal for you. If you happen to already have a large garden to tend, an orchard, animals, homeschool, etc…ease matters. There is only so much time in the day.

Last year we added 8 new raised beds around the perimeter of the garden for strawberries. This has been a nice amount of our family. This area tightly fit 200 plants. I crammed 25 plants in each bed. That was too tight and not necessary but I had a lot.

Strawberries make lots of babies via runners. These are little baby plants that grow from the main plants. So leaving room is better as they will fill in quickly with runners. Once your beds are filled you can pinch off runners and stick the nubby part into water and they will form roots. You can give these away or sell them. They produce A LOT of runners so I like to give them away but it would be a nice thing to do for a farmers market. Planting the runners after they are rooted for sale.

Considerations for planting: strawberry plants need a watering source. They do significantly better when watered on a regular basis. I have some that I cannot reach with my hose and they are kind of a we get what we get bed. They do not produce as well. Blueberries, gooseberries, and currants have done fine without watering here where we live. We have a lot of plants to tend and some are far from a water source. Since I can’t reach them with the hose, I heavily mulch them. I had planned to irrigate them eventually but sometimes things change.

Planting in a bed: you can use whatever you have available to you. You do not need to go out and buy beds unless you want to. You can make beds out of anything. They do well in full sun. You could plant them on the south facing side of your home. I prefer to utilize this space for figs since it is a very warm place and I have other spaces for berries. But the reason I mention planting along the house is for ease. The house acts as one side of the bed so you only need to build up the other sides. Depending on how you are going to make your beds, I recommend either weed whacking short and sheet mulching or taking up the sod over tilling.

Our beds were an experiment that turned out well. I sheet mulched by putting a wheel barrow or two of sawdust in the bottom on top of the barrier. Next we added chicken bedding with manure mixed in that had been in the coop over the winter. Not composted but ready to clean out from using the deep litter method over the winter. We put a wheel barrow or two of this in each bed next. Then we added compost to plant directly in. The stuff underneath will do a couple of things. It will hold moisture and it will break down over time and feed the plants. I wasn’t sure how this would work but it worked very well!

There is another reason to plant in a bed. Strawberry plants can be a pain to deal with in terms of life expectancy. Having to figure out a way to collect runners for new plants and swap them out is not something I wanted to deal with. Instead, every couple of years you can mulch them thickly and the strongest plants come up. A bed helps contain the mulch. You do not need a very deep bed. In fact too deep a bed with too high of walls can result in moldy berries from them not getting enough air flow.

You can make a bed out of anything you have. For around the house, we use rocks we gathered when digging holes for fruit trees. They were plentiful!

You can’t tell in this picture but, this is a bed of summer bearing raspberries.

This is the same bed two years prior from a different angle. See what happens when we plant food! We get food!

So this bed is utilizing the house behind it. In this bed, my husband trimmed very short. We should have taken the sod off because there was an invasive plant beneath that has continued to push through. Next, we laid heavy cardboard and lined with rocks. Then we mulched thickly. When I planted, I pushed away the wood chips and put soil in that spot. This was for raspberries and elderberries. I don’t recommend this method for strawberries. They would need soil as I described above. You can see from the picture, it worked well.

In addition to lots of fresh eating, we froze a lot of strawberries this year. We also made fruit leather with applesauce and strawberries, crumbles, muffins, ice cream. In previous years I have made jam as well and sorbet.

Here is a pan muffin and crumble recipe I made this year. I just substituted the blackberries with strawberries. I use whole grain spelt flour in the muffin recipe. The cobbler recipe is grain free. If you want it paleo, you can substitute the butter with coconut oil with a pinch of salt and a tablespoon of nutritional yeast for a butter flavor.

Strawberry muffin bread & Strawberry crumble.

It was always a dream of mine to have my children be able to go outside and eat good food. And that, they do. We have planted food all over the place for that reason. Planting food is a small investment monetarily speaking. It definitely costs more in time and energy but look at what you get! Manufactured food is not grown for the same purpose. It is manufactured for profit. Where there is profit, there will not be the same thoughts in production. For example growing large quantities of food can mean using pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc to produce. Organic producers still use some but they have to be approved. The berries are picked and washed and packaged and shipped. There are a lot of things that can happen in that process. This year there was a hepatitis ”breakout” with organic strawberries. Kind of scary. I prefer growing my own hands down. Then I know every bit of what goes in and how they are processed. Things can happen at home too, but this gives me more control over my food supply.

Picking berries for breakfast after a rain in pajamas. Talk about fresh food!

She had just picked a snack here of strawberries.

I started this post months ago when we were picking. Now it is almost fall and we have lots of runners so I can finish my post. This is the fun part. As I said before, strawberries produce a lot of babies. If you have a friend that has strawberries, ask for some runners! There is enough time now to grow the roots and plant them before winter so they can be established to make it through the winter.

In the center of this photograph is a little baby strawberry plant. You can see the nubs of roots beginning.

Here are a handful I pulled out to root. The one with the big roots had already planted itself in soil outside a bed. They like to spill out over the beds…like young adults trying to find their own way, lol. You can see the roots are at various stages.

I gathered the runners in my hand so that the roots were all together and put them in water. These will not take long to root. I will update when they have enough roots to plant. Before I ripped these young-ins away from their mothers, momma was feeding them from her roots. Placing them in water helps their roots to grow prior to planting. If you have your own strawberries already you can ”catch” these guys buy putting a container with soil underneath it and setting the root nubs on top. It will establish roots with very little effort from you. Once it has done so, you cut the line from the mother, and plant where you want it or give away.

Now, go get yourself some runners! They are free if you have a friend with strawberries that is willing to share. One main reason for this post is for folks I will be giving away runners to. You only need a temporary place to plant them in the ground once they root. You can mulch them for the winter and move them once they wake up in the spring. So, you do not need a bed ready right now if that is your chosen method. I do recommend planting them in the ground as soon as possible so they can spread out before the ground freezes. At the peak of picking, we were getting about 16 cups a day this year. That was a huge blessing for our family. We planted these last year. That is a great turn around if you ask me. We were picking a few times a day last year in small quantities for snacks…the same year we planted! We do NOT pick flowers off our plants the first year. We have way too many to do that. Besides, we ate the berries instead 😉 They were delicious. I hope I have inspired you to plant some strawberries! Cheers!

Growing Food

Posted on June 17, 2022June 17, 2022 by ginamcmanig

I would like to talk about the importance of growing our own food. With the way our world is, it is so important. I don’t care how much money you have to buy all the “organic” food in the world. Unless you know the farmer, you don’t really know what you are getting. With that said, props to all the true organic farmers out there. When a product is sold, it is done so to bring in money. As you have seen on your grocers shelves you can find many ”natural” and organic foods these days. This is very simply supply and demand. People have spoken with their dollars and companies are meeting those demands. I love seeing more of this…BUT, there are so many benefits to growing your own. Gardening isn’t for everyone…but everyone eats 😉 It is such a great skill to have and to teach our children.

I love using these cattle panels to make arches for growing vines such as melons, squash, and cucumbers. These save space and create nice visual interest in a garden. My children love to play underneath them.

Are you are interested in growing food but don’t know where to start? Maybe you have a lot of questions and feel that you don’t know what you are doing? Maybe just the thought is overwhelming? BUT, oh how you would love to have fresh food readily available! If this sounds like you, this post is for you. Our fears stop us from many things in our life. When you think of gardening maybe the word fear doesn’t come to mind. Essentially those thoughts I mentioned, if we pick them apart, may come down to some fears. Maybe that fear is messing up? Perhaps wasting time? Maybe it is wasting money? Maybe it is simply not a high priority for you? And let us all be grateful for grocery stores and farmers markets for the times in our lives when we need them! Sometimes we just have so many questions we don’t move forward. It may not be a priority for your family. It is for mine.

We live in a culture that believes we need to be an expert in order to do things. That mentality stops us in some cases from believing in ourselves. It leaves us thinking we have to know everything in order to try something new. Well friends, I am here to tell you that you do not need a masters degree to grow food. You don’t need a bachelors, nor an associates. Plants are awesome and amazing in their ability to keep on keeping on. There is that. I will explain that further shortly. Also, there is a lot of value in learning through trial and error. A lot. If the thought of growing food is overwhelming because you think you don’t know what you are doing, please, read on.

Different varieties of kale and mustard greens.

I really want to encourage you to start. Just start. If you never plant it…whatever it may be, it will never grow. It doesn’t need to be perfect. You don’t need to be an expert. In fact, I am going to talk about how easy gardening can be here in this post. Yes, gardens take work. No doubt about that. Today I am going to share with you how I garden and why I chose these methods. I have had several gardens. By far, my favorite, is having raised beds. I chose this after getting pregnant with my last child and not being able to keep up with the garden. Then, guess what happened next? I had a baby, lol. I could not keep up with a garden. That garden was a big fat mess full of weeds after such neglect. You do not need raised beds to garden. There is nothing wrong with having a garden directly in the ground! You can do it any way you like! But this is my preferred method. It comes with some great benefits like no tilling and many others when you get them established. Beds have more upfront work but once they are done, are so much easier in my opinion. The benefits of the upfront set up far exceed the extra work for me.

The first thing I did was think about how I could make beds with very little money. The thought of metal beds came from learning about growing sweet potatoes. They like heat. We happen to have zero shade and sweet potatoes do well here. Metal beds would help heat up the soil. I started looking for materials and read up on safety. I had a friend that had some old corrugated roofing buried under some brush on his property. He kindly gave it to us. We bought some rough cut lumber at an Amish mill locally and got to work. I marked the metal and my husband cut it with his circular saw (blade in backwards) while I hid behind a garage door. I really enjoy working with wood but was afraid of cutting metal for sure! Do be careful if you go this route. We used rough cut hemlock wood as it was the best we could afford at the time. I don’t recommend hemlock. It weathered very quickly. Cedar would have been a better choice but it was out of our reach at the time. Use what you have and do what you gotta do. We built the beds 6’L x 3’W x 16”D. We worked with the dimensions the metal pieces were. They were double that high so cut them in half. We were able to build 6 beds for very little money.

These beds with wood are the first beds we built as of last year. They are still functional but are starting to fall apart. One could just get some cedar and replace the wood. That would not be hard to do. You can see there is some duct tape on the end bed here. There were some sharp holes that I covered up for safety to keep little fingers out.

So we started with six beds. The following year I found metal beds almost the same size except they were only a foot deep. We bough 12 more beds over the year as we could. There was a great sale after the first six. I think we paid around $40 a bed for the first six and $30 something each for the next six with an even better sale. These beds were so much easier! They are all metal so should hold up much longer. I put them together alone with ease and placed them where I wanted them. Every year we invest in something that will feed us. Fruit trees or berry bushes or canes…for a couple of years we invested in beds as we could. At that point we then had 18 raised beds. I absolutely love raised beds. They have no bottom. We weedwhacked very short and placed them on the ground. I then put a barrier down to kill the grass and such. I love using old cotton or wool clothing or bedding for this. I don’t use any synthetics. We save our old clothing, sheets and towels through the year for this purpose. We use it as landscaping fabric. It is much better than the plastic stuff especially when growing food. Thick 6 mil plastic is fine for inbetween beds or rows to keep the weeds down as well as killing off an area prior. I hope to eventually add flat rock with thyme in between where the grass has been killed off for less maintenance. Back to the beds! You can also use cardboard in the bottom of the beds before filling. Just be sure to trim the grass very low first. Fabric lasts much longer than cardboard and newspaper and I prefer it. Covering weakens the plants so they die off easier. Think of what happens to newspaper when it gets wet vs laundry coming out of your washer. Fabric is much stronger. Thick cardboard works well too. The key is covering it deeply enough. Both things will rot over time. But if done well, it will kill the plants below.

Depending on the depth of your beds, you may want to add some old wood if you can. Wood such as that found in the forest. You don’t want to use treated lumber in your bed…or outside your bed when growing food in my opinion. Grab a wheelbarrow and gather old rotted wood to put as your first layer of your new beds. If you don’t have access to this, grab a tote or feed sack and head to some state land or a neighbors or family members home. You might also find branches and things out at the curb on certain days for brush removal in a neighborhood. You could call your local DPW to find out when. Maybe you have a refuse center with piles available? We live in the country and have woods so we just go out back and gather. Find some wood that will fit in the dimensions of your bed. Old rotten wood is wonderful. This layer will continue to breakdown and will offer your plants moisture from underneath. I like to top the wood with a layer of old leaves and twigs after that.

Next we add soil. I have two favorite soil sources. The forest floor, or our old composted chicken bedding with manure all throughout. So to recap thus far: Make a bed. Cover the floor of the bed with a natural material that will block out light from the grass. Add some old rotted wood. Top with old leaves and twigs, fill with soil. If you have to buy soil, this will get expensive fast. Find what you can from other sources. Someone may have a big old pile of composted manure that they would love for you to get rid of. Ask around. Post in community groups.

American Hazelnuts in lower right corner started from seed.

WAYS TO MAKE GARDENING EASIER:

RAISED GARDEN BEDS

Raised garden beds make life a lot easier. My beds are 6’x3’. I really like this size. I can easily reach in from any side to weed. In a bed style of planting, you plant closer together so fit much more food in a smaller space. For example, if a plant needs 6” in between each other, in a traditional garden, you would have one row of that plant with 6” in between then lots of space in between the rows to walk and harvest. In a bed, you plant that same plant 6” in both directions…no rows. This method can be done directly in the ground or in a raised bed.

I realize some do not have the means or capability to grow food. Gardening is physical work. Putting up food is work. Both of these things take time. However, there are methods that can make gardening easier and preserving faster. Gardens can be made to accommodate physical challenges. For those with ground to plant in that have physical difficulty, perhaps raised beds would help. You can make beds deep and use a garden bench to sit while gardening. Everyone is going to be different in this regard but if you really want to garden, find a way if possible. Perhaps someone without the ground to plant in would be willing to do the work on your land and share the bounty.

If you do not have your own ground to plant in, ask a neighbor or friend or family member. Maybe look into starting a community garden. Sometimes grants can be found for these kinds of things. Maybe your community already has a community garden. Where there is a will, there is a way!

This year has been a particularly difficult one for me. Planting was not super high on the priority list. I planted only two flats (72 cell). And then only added to what was already there. This is big folks.

LEAVE A PLANT
One of my best tips for easy gardening is leaving one of each plant to go to seed. Don’t pull it out in the fall. Leave that baby alone! Resist the urge to clean out the garden. Because raised beds are not tilled, the plants freely seed themselves into the beds and you do nothing! They pop up in the spring with zero effort from you. You can then do what you choose with them. You can rearrange if you desire or leave them or give them away. This year I had parsley, cilantro, dill, mizuna, kale, lettuce, red mustard greens, borage, Swiss chard, carrots, garlic, chives, tomatoes, nasturtiums, and sunflowers already growing in my garden. Let me tell you, this was a Godsend for our family. This is the way these plants were designed to grow! It doesn’t need to be hard folks! I filled in the open spaces with seeds and rearranged some. This took very little work. Gardening does NOT have to be hard.

From left to right: Gooseberries, blueberries, raspberries.

So folks, I would like to offer you encouragement to START GROWING! Start growing in whatever way you can! It doesn’t need to be ”perfect”…you just need to start! It is okay if things don’t go exactly as planned. I hope this offers you some inspiration to grow some food! It is wonderful walking outside and gathering your own home grown food! Happy planting!