Raised vs tilled?

[hwillm1977]

We do both here too... we have a tilled garden that's only about 20x20, that's just corn, beans and squash and some cucumbers around the perimeter... there's no real rows in there, everything kind of grows together.

Then we have 4 - 4x20 foot raised beds for veggies, 4 - 4x4 raised beds for herbs and one 3x10 foot raised bed for potatoes. It's taken years to get that many beds, we build one or two a year because that's all we can afford to do. I like the raised beds a lot better and most stuff seems to grow better in the raised beds for me.

 

[leolady]

I have raised beds for all of my vegetables and they are no till. I am getting too old to do all the bending for tilled regular gardening.

 

[Dawn419]

We used to do regular tilled gardens but since moving to the Arkansas Ozarks, we've been left with no choice but to do raised beds, since the "soil" is so thin and rocky. There's no such thing as , "I am going to dig a hole" here...it involves a lot of rock removal and not much soil.

Our two, 5' x 20' raised beds were free...the bed borders are trees cut down from clearing the garden spot and the filler is free river-bottom top soil from the neighbor.

 

[smackiesmommy]

Well because of money we did a tilled bed and boy was it a chore. We had a lot of rocks in our yard but my husband worked his butt off and worked through it. We now have a beautiful (and a little pittiful if you look at my romane) 16x16 bed.

 

[Theo]

I think it has to do more with the type of soil you have and what you're planting than anything else. Our land tends to be wet so we use raised beds/rows. You don't have to make a special raised bed frame, either. I till, then scoop dirt from the paths into the beds. Voila, raised bed. Raised beds don't have to be "high" either. A few inches is all you need. Raised beds improve drainage, and plants that prefer good drainage do well in them.

A cheap way to do raised beds is lasagna gardening. No tilling, just start out with a layer of newspaper or cardboard, then pile up leaves, kitchen compost, straw, dirt. I use what I've got instead of buying expensive components like peat moss. You can make a tall pile of scraps, let it compost down a bit, then plant. There is a lot of information on how to start a lasagna bed on the internet.

 

[lorihadams]

We have lots of clay and rocks so we did 10 raised beds and we have been working for the last 2 years to get spaces for tilled gardens too. We have them both tilled up now and ready to plant corn in one and my tomatoes, peppers, and bush beans are going in the other. I like the raised beds for stuff like lettuces, turnips, chard, spinach, cukes (attach trellises), carrots, herbs, cabbages, broccoli, kohlrabi, bok choy, beets, stuff that doesn't need really deep roots or lots of space. Greens also work well in beds too.

My mother has back problems so my dad built raised beds that are 3 ft tall for her. She loves them. He got free fill dirt and filled in the bottom 2 1/2 feet with that and then got a load of topsoil/compost mix and filled in the top 6-8 inches with that. It cost a bunch initially but they love them cause they don't have to bend like a traditional garden.

Think about using some things as landscaping...chard and some leafy greens are gorgeous and look wonderful next to a house. You don't have to spend a lot of money to make a raised bed either. You can do them with rocks as edging or just pile them up kind of free form with paths in between. I love mine, they are made from 2x12s so that we could plant some deeper stuff like carrots.

It just depends on what you want to plant. You can stick stuff around borders of flower beds that are edibles...stuff like lettuce would be beautiful.

 

[barefootfarmer]

I live in central Texas where the soil is rather sandy and not that great. I went with raised beds and love them for many reasons.

1. Soil management - you know what kind of soil is in there, you can maintain it.
2. Longer planting season - because the soil in a raised bed will warm earlier in the Spring and stay warmer longer into the fall/winter, you have a longer harvesting season.
3. Weed Control - I tend to have less weeds in the raised beds. (i also have a weed barrier at the very bottom where the beds where it meets the ground)
4. Lastly, i think it just looks stinkin cool. I like the look of raised beds.

My two cents...

 

[barefootfarmer]

Also, forgot to mention. I used all recycled material that I was able to get for free. So the lumber I used for the raised beds was repurposed, so the cost was very low! I recommend recycling anytime you can!

 

[Candy]

I have both kinds of beds but I will say that raised beds after the fraime is build and paid for dont have to cost much at all.
I layer stuff in like a layer of cardboard at the bottom to keep weeds down from the soil below, a layer of leaves, a layer of grass clippings, a layer of barnyard maneur, a little chicken maneur, a layer of staw. repeat that two or three times till its filled. Then I save my very finest homemade compost for the top two inches and thats what I put the seeds or seedlings into. I also add some handfuls of natural guard soil fertilzer... its a soil activator that promotes microbes in the soil and the breakdown of all that stuff into compost over the season.

 

[Niele da Kine]

The first raised bed garden was sort of an accidental Christmas present. My DH was installing his Christmas present which was a hot tub and had three wheelbarrow loads of top soil he wasn't sure what to do with. It was put into a pile and concrete blocks were stacked around it. It's only about six feet by eight or ten feet and two blocks high, but it's a lovely garden. Really easy to maintain, easy to water, easy to over plant but then it's easy enough to feed that many plants, too. We've been eating beans and lettuce and beets, the watermelons have escaped and ran off across the front yard, the tomatoes are going nuts. There are strawberries and sweet potatoes hiding around on the other side and my vegetarian friend keeps drooling on it. At least, when he's not eating the flowers anyway. There's nasturtiums and violets which make a nice addition to salads.

We filled the garden with half rotted compost and liberally laced it with bunny berries cleaned out from under the bunny cages. I'm building another one now, but it's not done quite yet. It provides us with a lot of vegetables but not so many that we aren't able to eat them all.