I have been more or less a flat gardener for decades. I plant double rows spaced about three feet apart. It's not that I never used raised beds but I had limited them to strawberries, asparagus and some salad boxes. About eight years ago when we moved into our current place the spring water table in our spot was so high I began using borderless raised beds that I just mounded up with my tiller, some compost and a rake. It has worked reasonably well except for the weeds. The weed seed load makes direct seeding of some things near impossible and even if I do manage to get good stands started keeping a row clear until it can be mulched is a challenge.
A few weeks ago I was moaning and groaning to my wife about the weeds as I was working up my garden plan for the year. She listened quietly for a while as she continued flipping through her flower gardening magazines. Suddenly she got up and left the room. A few minutes later she came back with one of her gardening scrapbooks. They are where she puts pictures she clips out of magazines when she finds them interesting. She placed it front of me and asked, “Honey, why don’t you fix it?” There in her scrapbook was a garden of four-foot square raised beds. I agreed with her that it was time to think about it so I started figuring up how to lay it out within the existing fence.
I thought the four-foot square beds wasteful of space and started making 3x8 or 4x8 beds with 3-foot paths. I ran into problems getting the beds to fill the space without either crowding the beds by narrowing the paths or having an odd sized/wasted area on one side of the garden. Finally I tried the 4x4 beds and … Bingo! I ended up with a two-foot wide bed along each side of the garden along the fence and between them I get fifteen 4x4 beds perfectly spaced within having 3-foot paths….
I asked her if the fence around the garden in her picture was what she had in mind when she talked me into putting the wooden one around mine six years before when some rabbits had set up shop.... Naturally, it was.
Anyway, today was a good day. The project actually got off, or rather onto the ground.
