Comparison of different garden beds

Update on garden beds:

From an earlier post, I explained that I had three different styles of garden vegetable beds this year: conventional raised beds, which I developed a few years ago using sheet composting; a commercial garden table (raised table, 4 ft by 4 ft, 18 inches deep at center), and some straw bales. The raised beds and bales got lots of direct sun, while the garden table was usually somewhat shaded, at least early in the day.  The raised beds were on automatic drip irrigation, the other two were watered by hand.  here are pics taken towards the end of July:

Garden Table:

The plants you see are eggplant, cucumber, some kind of cabbage, basil, and some peppers.  these did very well, very happy.

This is the straw bale.  Not so impressive, although even in our exceedingly hot summer, this thing held on to water like nobody's business. I think my mistake was mostly just not fertilizing it enough. AS my husband said, this is really hydroponic gardening.

Didn't get a  July picture of the raised beds, but not much was going on there.  My theory is that the 6 inches of improved soil isn't enough; the garden is otherwise on bedrock, a shale, so I think those beds need to be deeper to be really successful.  I do have this one picture of a black raspberry I planted a few years ago; it's doing very well in the raised bed garden, but the bed it's in is much deeper than the others, probably 10 inches. 

 

Conclusion?  The garden table is a great thing, although you need a lot of soil to fill it.