Marla Vendret

My first garden was made up of long narrow hills where I planted my seeds and starts (that I had germinated). It was a swampy mess since the valleys would fill up with water because of the heavy clay soil. Later, I discovered that “raised beds” were actually about 4’ wide and as long as you wanted them to be—wish I would have understood that earlier—so I redid the garden design the next year. I really can’t remember the time and order of the things I later did, except that it became more and more elaborate. I eventually had about ½ acre planted, with ¼ acre plot corn and gourds. (You can see how big the garden is by this picture. Unfortunately, that was the same year that our duck population exploded and they all ate my corn before I realized what they were doing!)

 

Eventually we built a greenhouse of sorts from recycled materials. That was when the gardening became really elaborate. I had hundreds of plants and could easily draw out the seasons—early spring to late fall. I was a gardening crazy-women. If I had restricted my gardening just to the vegetables, I probably would have done fine, but I also created edible landscaping around the property. I could tell you exactly when, where, how and why each plant, shrub and tree was usable as a savory, medicinal, or food application.

 

For one person, it was too much and, as the years passed, I had to acknowledge it. So I cut back. Garden by garden, I turned patches into grass and winnowed away at what things to focus my efforts on. Surprisingly, one of the biggest cutbacks was the vegetable garden. Quite simply, I enjoyed landscaping much more. The last few years, I haven’t done a vegetable garden at all.

 

There were multiple reasons for it. I no longer had an old stove to do the canning. I kept wanting to make my vegetable garden as pretty as the landscaping, but my brick paths would inevitably be buried in dirt and weeds by the end of the season. It felt like a losing battle. If my hubby or kids had helped, I might not have given up, but doing it all was too overwhelming, especially after I hurt my back and had back surgery.

 

Which takes me to our project in the vegetable garden.

 

My neighbors built a landscape timber vegetable bed and my hubby loved it. He loved it so much, we went to Lowes and purchased 15 lumbers (@ $1.95 each), 20 braces (@ .49 each) the next weekend. It only took a couple hours to put together. Most of the time was expended leveling the soil and making the cuts. It was a quick and easy project that even an amateur could do. I must warn you, though, to be careful what braces you purchase. Most were $1 or more and that would significantly add to the cost of this project. I figure I’ll get about 10-15 years from this bed, so the $55 I spent on the bed will average out to $5-10 dollars a year per bed. If we built three more beds (which is in the plans), that’ll still be less than $30 per year. So now I have my raised beds contained in timbers, thus making it possible to keep those brick paths clean!

 

Notice that I also purchased top soil (@ $10) and peat moss (@ $11). My garden soil was incredibly rich because of the amount of animal compost we’d added to it over the years when we had farm animals, so I just wanted to raise the soil level and loosen it a bit more which is why I chose those particular soil amendments. Others might need to use grit (NOT sand) to loosen their clay soil or compost to enrich their sandy soils.

 

As you can see, there are several other projects in the works around this very small garden plot. We’ll be added another vegetable bed this next weekend, then start creating smaller timber beds for the berry plants that I have.

 

In the meantime, I’ll take those scavenged bricks you see piled around garden and create weed-free paths with them (again). Only this time, the paths should be able to stay cleaner, and thus easier to manage.

 

Here's the final product after about 2 hours work.