Raised Beds

I am amazed at some of the things called ‘RAISED BEDS’ I see advertised or in articles, whether for sale new or plans for do it yourself, these are NOT raised beds but CONTAINERS. They are filled with all sorts of growing medium and people think they are growing healthily vegetables. Please think again.

Healthy food comes from healthy soil.

I know, I’ve heard it all before ‘my soils no good’ Well the essential art of gardening is to enhance the cycle of life by finding ways to restore humus to the soil. All gardeners find their own way to achieve this. All Soil can be improved, sure it may take time but quality produce only comes from quality soil. As you observe your soil .like any other living thing  it is always changing and telling its own story. There is more life beneath the soil than above therefore you need to encourage and cultivate its existence.

Understanding your soil is a basic requirement for the success of your veggie garden. You can build tremendous satisfaction from working with the soil, building its tilth, fertility & water holding capacity.

WHAT IS A RAISED BED?

2000 years ago the Greeks noticed that plant life thrived on landslips. Loose soil allows air, moisture, warmth, nutrients and roots to properly penetrate the soil. In the 1920’s the biodynamic method brought back the raised bed plantings 

The curved surface area between the 2 edges of the bed provide more surface area for planting and the penetration and interaction of the natural elements than a flat surface . They also have the advantage of being raised (10-30cm) above the surrounding area adding more life, increasing soil depth, air, more earthworms, and micro organisms and with improving drainage.

Beds can be any length, ideally 1 metre wide so you can easily reach across the bed.10-30 cm higher than the original surface.

The preparation of the raised bed is most important

I feel gardens need to be dug especially in the beginning. The tired and compacted soil needs to be woken up, loosened and aerated. Roots from nearby trees that are invading will need digging out. Try to only dig the topsoil. All the life is there. Traditional double digging is a good method to use. In addition the top few cm of soil from the pathways can be dug out and added to the bed. Over time the more compost you add, on a seasonal basis, the lighter the soil becomes.

Modified Raised Beds

Raised beds can be surrounded by a structure. They should be between 10-30cm high. Although this reduces the surface area it contains the soil. It’s an ideal system on slopes and terraces.

It is a disadvantage if there is any risk of running type grasses e.g. couch, kukupa.

Tree roots seek out rich soil and water, invading cultivated beds robbing the plants of nourishment and stunting their growth. They should be dug over as often as needed depending on the severity.

I have used small permanent raised beds for the past 30+ years. When I started the site of my garden was part of our driveway, highly compacted soil mixed with gravel that sloped away. The tilth improved quickly with raised bed and good biodynamic compost and within a couple of seasons you only required minimum effort to grow anything.

Preparing the bed is the most time-consuming aspect to a well-prepared garden...

To make the beds

Mark out your bed & foot paths. Dig over the bed area . If you think it’s too much work, remember that this is a once off job and it does not have to be done instantly, take your time and you will be surprised how much your soil will reveal about itself as it’s awakened.

Top soil from the surrounding area (footpaths) is added and then the soil can mounded up to form a bed approx 1 metre wide - this will increase the soil depth and improve the drainage quite dramatically .Do not dig into the sub soil layer. 

Quality humus rich compost is dug into the beds *If in the beginning you do not have any compost there are many ‘organic’ fertilisers on the market. Be careful when choosing, for many have added soluble fertilisers. Such as Nitrogen (N) and phosphate (P) for the future go and learn how to make quality compost.

 

· The beds can now be planted.

· As the beds warm up & plants become established they can be mulched.

· Simple really

If you make the effort this is the opportunity, as there is nowhere else on this earth like your garden, with its own combination of soil, micro climate, microorganisms and YOU. As you interact with your garden, no matter how small, you put your stamp on it and contribute to its individuality and not just have fresh produce but have fresh produce rich in the earth’s own energies that are truly good for you and your family.

Nobody else will be able to produce vegetables that taste quite the same as yours. What could be better than eating food grown in your unique garden?

 

A warm place to work out of the rain,hail and wind

Awoke to large piles of icy hail around the place , 43.5 mm  in the rain gauge for the past 24 hours and more rain,hail and wind on the way I headed to the polyhouse to get things done.Normally in winter polyhouse there are daily harvests of greens for us and the chooks. Our flock require a large basket  full of greens to be blended into their mash daily and the outside gardens never grow fast enough in winter to keep up.

 

This year has been quite different as I was out of action from Spring to Autumn with firstly with a broken leg (Thanks to neighbours goat, which is still managing to climb the fence to my vegies garden.) Then a new knee! Over this time the polyhouse became covered in lovegrass whose seeds latch on to your clothes and was proberly responsible for the invention of Velcro. To remove this weed required me to wear a polyester type bee suit,and long gumboots and still some seeds ended up on my socks.Once removed the beds where dug over to remove invading roots , the soil had mineralized , which means when you push the spade in you hear a crunching sound similar to putting a spade into gravel or the grittiness of potting soil or when  compost has been left too  long.

It was now late May and getting too late to plant most things even in side.

The two centre beds had some of my humus rich  compost dug in and where planted with brought in brassicas seedings and lettuce,kale and silver beet seedlings from my garden. The outside beds where left dug over and watered to get the weeds to germinate and today I dug them in as a green manure and then stirred some biodynamic barrel compost and treated all the beds. Next week I will dig in some  humus rich  compost and do another stirring of barrel compost and it will be ready for spring planting  and some  biodynamic 500  to get an early start  for the summer vegies.

Before Winter Sets In.

June is the time for clearing up, pruning and preparing for the winter rains.

One important job that requires doing before winter sets in, is to make the biodynamic preparations. So last weekend with a perfect autumn day a few of us from the Adelaide Hills Biodynamic group set about filling the horns with fresh manure from Paris Creek BD farm, preparing the compost preparations of yarrow, chamomile, oak and dandelion.

The horns where buried in their usual pit of rich soil and the horn silica (501) was retrieved after spending summer in the earth.

The compost preparations in their clay pots are buried in the humus rich soil of the vegie garden. The oak is down in the wet valley.

Another job is to brush cut the banks after which they had an application of cow pat pit followed by horn manure (500). I then planted some mixed legumes and wheat seeds and within 24 hours the geese where systematically grazing the banks. But really it’s a win, win situation as they don’t often graze these steep banks. Their manure will add to the cut grass to break down and enrich the banks, they will miss a percentage of seeds so they can come back and graze on the new green growth.

I have been renovating a blackcurrant patch, which had been plant about 20 years ago in a star shape. Nice idea but they were a pain to manage and difficult to pick, so I finally decided it was time to change the area. A week or so ago with the help of Gibberagunyah Chris, we moved them into 5 rows , keeping some older bushes and planting some new ones I had propagated last year. After it was completed, I looked at the area and the types of weeds that where growing and decided the rows needed some attention and compost added.

As I embarked on the weeding I was firstly surprised how easily the fork slid into the soil and the weeds lifted out. These are not the usual backyard weeds, this area is often waterlogged (blackcurrants love this type of soil) and a special range of plants adapt to protect the soil .These include deep rooting dock, reeds and other water type plants with very fibrously deep roots and paspalum a very tough grass with very tight fibrous roots – the hardest to dig out.

As I weeded the tilth of the soil would make most vegie growers envious, the fork just glided through. The soil had not really been touched since the’ star’ was planted. Annual maintenance of brushcutting, and weeding around the bushes and adding a little compost. But I should not be surprised at the soil quality since the entire farm as been regularly treated with the biodynamic preparations in autumn and spring for the past 20+ years.

When we started in 1983 the whole valley was very waterlogged with a pH of 3.5- 4, very anaerobic and the soil smelt really bad in fact the stench stayed on your hands for days. Since then drains have been added, raised beds, compost and biodynamic preparations. The area still gets waterlogged – usually in spring, although in the last couple of years less so, the pH is around6-6.5 and the soil smells sweet and earthy.

The Earth Beneath My Feet

The seasons are changing; summer is slowly making way for autumn. In the air there are still clouds of common brown butterflies & dragon flies, the flame robins look fat & happy and the eastern spinebills are keeping me on my toes as they mimic our customer beeper.
My boots repel the heavy dew that glistens in the morning sunlight; the leaves rustle as I walk through the orchard. Picking chestnuts means eyes to the ground , as well as chestnuts & their burrs around my feet I see new ant hills,

spider holes, worm castings, freshly germinated clover and a multitude of fungi.

My mind drifts off wondering about these interesting fruiting bodies that started off as a spore. When the spore germinates it produces tiny threads called hyphae. When mattered together, these hyphae form mycelium before they appear above ground as fungi. There are many types here but wouldn’t it be nice if some where edible, may be a truffle or morel or chanterelle even a field mushroom (actually there are a few patches of mushrooms) but a greater array would be nice.

Then to the bigger picture, the soil and the world it contains, since a handful of good soil can contain millions of life forms what does their world look like. To start with there are the macro organisms, the ones you can see such as earthworms, springtails, ants, millipedes, mites, and nematodes.
Then there are bacteria such as rhizobia, that fix nitrogen, bacteria that works with phosphate, mycorrhizae fungi, actinomycetes and protozoa.
All these life forms interact to build soil structure. The bacteria exude polysaccharides (sugar) which bind partials of soil to form pods and develop soil structure .The hyphae of Mycorrhizae fungi also bind soil partials .The mycorrhizal fungi also form symbiotic relationship with the roots of plants. Carbohydrates are supplied by the plants and in exchange the fungi search out nutrients and moisture for the plants. The hyphae look like fine cobwebs, around 1 micron. Mycorrhizae fungi are not host specific and often spread from plant to plant and species to species. The strands of their hyphae are interconnected and apparently travel long distances seeking nutrients for plants. In addition various helpful bacteria assist plants to get their nutrition far away from their root zones.

All these processes are enhanced by the addition of good compost which provides the material for the micro organisms to work.

While thinking of these relationships Peter Proctor suggests that in the Agriculture course given Rudolf Steiner in 1924 when talking about the preparations for the first time and how they would enrich soils & plants that in Chapter 5 these micro organisms are what he was talking about.
“Now if you treat the soil as I have described, the plants will be able to draw on what they need from a very wide area. They will be able to use not only what is in their own field, but also what is in the soil of a nearby meadow if they need it or what is in the soil in a neighboring forest”
For me this paints a wonderful picture of another world, the world under my feet which is busy building life giving soil to grow health giving food.