Garden Tour – Raised Beds

As promised, we continue our tour of the Lost Valley Gardens test and market gardens today. These gardens were built over the past two years to test different varieties of vegetables, herbs, and perennials growing in raised beds in our area (Central Texas – eastern edge of the Edwards Plateau). We tried growing vegetables in in-ground beds for the first several seasons that we lived here with limited success. Our soil is extremely alkaline due to the large amount of limestone in our soil, and our well water is also high in alkalinity. To counteract these challenges, we built raised beds: 12″ deep; untreated cedar; filled with Geo Growers Thunder Garden mix and cow manure compost. We also installed rainwater collection gutters on the greenhouse, and a 10,000 gallon collection tank, the water from which we now use to irrigate the north garden rasied beds with a drip irrigation system. Our production has increased significantly since we made these improvements.

We began building our raised beds in the southeast area of our backyard. The pictures below were taken this morning, and show a typical late summer, early fall selection of vegetables and herbs. I will be planting more cole crops from the greenhouse in the next several weeks, and will be sowing carrots, beets, and snow peas directly into the garden also. The first photo shows a bed with Celebrity and Big Beef tomatos (just starting to set fruit), and a few Snow Crown cauliflower and Packman Broccoli plants.

The bed below contains sweet potatoes and several different types of peppers which were all planted last March.

The broadstem chard pictured below is now 2 years old! It has survived two of the hottest summers in the history of this area, and has never stopped producing sweet greens. I cannot say enough good things about this variety of swiss chard for our area.

Planted alongside the chard are some red ursa kale and great southern collards that have lasted all summer and are bouncing back nicely now.

The next bed is devoted to asparagus. We planted the asparagus sets in the spring of 2005, and we will start harvesting it this spring.

At the far east end of this set of beds is a bed devoted to herbs and perennial plants. I started this bed last spring, and all of the plants contained in it were germinated from seed in our greenhouse last winter. Some of the plants included are Maximillion sunflowers, flat leaf parsley, motherwort, sweet basil, rosemary, Lindheimer Daisy, sweet marjoram, valerian, yarrow, rudbeckia, coreopsis, blue shades verbena, lemon balm, and Korean licorice mint.

The next bed features cajun delight okras, eggplants, and broadstem chard. There are also a few miscellaneous flowers included; vinca, standing cypress, and yarrow. I also planted several ruby ball red cabbage seedlings in this bed a couple of days ago.

A couple of tomatillos, an eggplant, and a couple of parsley plants are left in this bed from spring. I will be planting root crops in this bed soon.

The other plant deserves a mention is the Texas Everlasing Fig tree planted at the west end of this area. It is 2 years old, and seems to be gaining a foothold.

The following photos show the north raised bed gardens. We have tomatoes, peppers, sweet potatoes, chard, and orka growing in these beds now, and we will be adding several crops in the next week or so. These gardens are primarily used to produce crops for taking to market.

The next leg of the tour will include the circle garden and the greenhouse crops.

Thanks for stopping by.