Gardening in raised beds

After a feeble & short-lived attempt at gardening in the rock-solid clay of Georgia, I decided to try gardening in raised beds. I designed the beds based off research done on line and with the aid of Mel Bartholomew's book, "All New Square Foot Gardening: Grow More in Less Space". Then, with the support of my generous & loving parents (who lent both muscle & money toward the project) & with Jeremy's help, we built the beds in March over the course of a week. The end result is that we now have two 6' long x 4' wide x 12" deep beds & three 4' long x 4' wide x 12" deep beds, which are constructed out of cedar (a rot & insect resistant wood) & sealed with a waterproof stain on the outsides (to provide them with additional protection from the elements). For the soil, we used a mixture of vermiculite, peat moss, compost and top soil. Lastly, we constructed grids dividing each raised bed into 12" x 12" squares, as recommended in Mel Bartholomew's book.














The image at the beginning of this post is of the raised beds around April. As you can see, at that point we had just planted a few things -- mostly lettuce, some tomatoes & peppers. A more recent photograph (above) shows them as they appear today -- filled with cucumbers, eggplants, herbs, peppers, squash, tomatoes, and other plants. However, the cucumbers & squash plants really haven't done very well in the raised beds, so I planted some in the yard. Ironically, those plants are thriving! Just see for yourself!

On the left are cucumber plants. Below are squash plants; we planted zucchini, straightneck & crookneck in mounds behind the raised beds & near to the sunflowers that I planted for the birds. I noticed recently that the squash plants are budding - I can't wait until we have fresh fruit to eat!