This year, we made big changes to how we grow our vegetables. We abandoned the raised beds and went with more traditional row gardening. Now that we are deep into the season, we can see whether this was a good thing or not, and my review would be mixed. The harvest has definately been plentiful.
The organic veggies have been great, but the overall gardening experience has been worse than in years past. I have not been able to keep up with the weeding and tending to the plants with the row system like is more possible with raised beds, so the garden is well, ... ugly.
Not exactly a successful row garden. I'm not blaming the method, necessarily. I'm just not a god row gardener. I'm a lousy one - lost without my raised beds. My wife and daughters don't even want to go to the garden much. So we plan to return to the smaller raised bed system and will be building new beds hopefully soon to be ready for the Spring. I hope to document that well here at Gardendesk. I miss writing here. Before that, I will document my successes and failures with each crop and post them in the coming days. There are some things about this year's garden that I like. The cucumber trellis for intsance:
But trellises are more of a raised bed thing, so it will be good to return to our roots.
I am looking forward to that and to returning to regular posting here as well. I hope your gardens are growing well this year!
Keep Growing!
Marc