Subject:
Why raised beds? 5-31-2012
I’ve
been gardening just about my whole life.
When I was growing up, we always had a garden because this was the only
way my parents could afford to feed a family the size of ours. We moved to Arkansas in 69 and with the price
of the farm came a mule (named Beck) with all the gee-whiz attachments that were
created for the technological ease and care of a farm. We had a sod-buster, a turning plow, a cultivator,
a six-bladed disk, a skid leveler … just about anything you could hook up to
the back of a mule, we had it.
It
was several years before my dad could afford a tractor, and my older brothers
took turns guiding the mule while us younger kids sat or stood on top of the
equip to weight it down enough to allow for a little subterranean penetration. We chunked rocks, pulled weeds, planted by
hand, watered by hand (from a bucket carried up-hill from the creek) and pushed
a hand plow that had a metal wheel (until one of my older brothers got the
bright idea to take a wheel off a three-speed bike to use in place of the metal
one).
After
I was grown and got a place of my own, I thought it was only natural to raise a
garden. I proceeded to clear out a spot
at the base of the yard and got an old second hand front tine tiller to do the
dirty work. After that first season of
being dragged around behind that old tiller and having my arms jerked half out
of the sockets every time it hit a root, or a rock, or just a hard spot in the
ground I had to find another way. By the
start of the second season, I bought me a brand-new rear-tine tiller that was
self-propelled and had a depth adjustment gauge for the tines … it still
dragged me all over the garden.
I
brought in truck-load after truck-load of leaves that I raked up in the woods,
old rottin’ hay that the cattle farmers would let me haul off just so they
wouldn’t have to burn it, load after load of manure that I forked into the
truck out of cattle fields where the farmers would feed their cattle … and the
top of the soil would still turn into concrete after every rain. The rain would wash through the garden and
leave big ruts in the middle of the rows as my plants, topsoil, and future
harvest headed downstream to assist in the buildup of soil in the delta region somewhere
in Louisiana. I still had to find
another way.
This kind of festered in my mind while I left for active duty military, and I spent several years noodling it over. A few years later (after I got out of the military), my wife at the time decided to go back to school (she had quit in the 9th grade), so after I helped her make it through the GED, she decided on a career of ornamental horticulture at the local Vo-Tech. I was always good at writing anyway, so I did all her papers for Comp-1 and Comp-2. In the process of this, I had to do the research for the papers as well. One of the papers she wanted to do was on raised bed gardening. The new plan began to grow …
More
later … Duane
