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. 

 

Garden experiment

Part of this blog will include my musings about garden plantings that have a whiff of the experimental about them. This year, more or less accidentally, we have three separate vegetable garden plots going. One is the conventional "raised bed",  which is located high up on our hill, in an area constructed into the hillside,.  The bedrock is a clayey-limey shale.  About three years ago I did some sheet composting, and gleaned about six inches of improved soil from that effort.  here's what that area looked like in May or thereabouts.

This upper garden is watered through a  drip system every day.  It gets a lot of direct sun, and we've had a hot summer, so these plants need every drop.  WE've had great success up here with onion family plantings, and have some success with strawberries and also some raspberries (pretty new planting). You can probably see the cold frame (there are two, both made by Juwel), and we have had lovely success with spring and winter gardening there, lots of nice lettuce, arugula, kale, and so on.

We also tried some straw bale gardening this year... a NYT article got me quite excited about this idea, especially since I just happened to have a couple of bales.  here's what that looked like in May:

It's planted with a couple of tomatoes in this picture, and also what I think is a cucumber (so I was told)

And, finally, we purchased a garden table last year, and planted it for the first time this spring.  It has only potting soil in it, which was lightly fertilized in the bag:

here it is in May.  The two things planted are a cucumber (towards the middle), and a basil plant (at the near end).

It wasn't my intention to compare each of these... I fully expected them all to be successful. But we do have a clear winner..... more to follow...