Making the beds

Our vegetable garden beds have been in the making since April.  We finished on Saturday.  The permaculturists and my favourite reference book direct me to create wide raised beds for planting.  They also tell me that once this work is done, I will never have to do it again.  But we do it every single year.  Something is wrong.



The idea behind raised beds is to have good drainage, a thick layer of loosened soil to accommodate root growth, and faster warming of the soil.  Between the beds is a trough, or swale, that collects water and delivers it, we hope, to the plants' roots.  Within the beds, row spacing as given on seed packages can be ignored because there won't be any walking between rows.  Human feet are permitted only on the paths between the beds because tromping through the beds would compress the soil.  For this reason, beds should only be twice as wide as one can comfortably reach for sowing, planting, weeding, pruning, harvesting.  A bed should not be so long that one is tempted to walk through it rather than around the end in order to get to the other side.  It is recommended that paths be covered with straw to suppress weed growth and avoid muck on one's shoes.

Sounds brilliant and simple.  Therefore, I'm feeling a bit of a dunce about not being able to do this properly.  I don't know how high the beds should be raised, nor have I taken pains to measure their elevations (all different, I'm sure).  Ed Smith (The Vegetable Gardener's Bible) says there should be 18 inches of loosened soil, but is that the difference between the top of the bed and the surface of the path or does the loosened soil go below path level?  I have no objection to building up 18 inches; it should be much easier on the back.  However, these raised beds are not walled, so I'm not getting a vertical edge.  For such a rise, the bed is going to lose a considerable area of planting at the edges unless I can convince seeds to stay put on a 50-60 degree incline until they get their roots going.  Incidentally, garden bellflower and quack grass have no qualms about proliferating on these slopes.  At the same time, our beds are not as wide as they might be.  A permaculture designer suggested that twice my arms length was a logical width, but it doesn't work for me.  Maybe after years of yoga training I could squat on the path and reach the horizontal distance of my arms, with both hands, while my arms are angled from their shoulders down to ground level.  For now, the beds have to be narrower than that.  So it seems there isn't much left after the side-sloping eats into them.  Then there is the straw issue.  The way these people talk, one would think bales of straw are readily available at every gas station and convenience store.  I live in a small urban city surrounded by fields of grain and have no idea where to find straw.  Our paths are filled with leaves, paving stones, and warped wooden planks.

Okay, I'm done complaining about my inability to turn theory into reality.  The beds are made - yay!  They started out rectangular (or a close approximation thereof) at the edges.  The perennial onion and chive habitat in the center of the garden then forced some modifications as the remaining spaces between that and the peas on one side and squash on the other was too wide for one bed and too narrow for two.  As luck would have it, I had recently attended a talk by Ron Berezan (The Urban Farmer) during which he mentioned keyhole beds.  Not his invention and not something I couldn't have, eventually, come up with myself.  Nevertheless, I credit him for putting the idea in front of me at the right time.  If the bed is a bit too wide, you can just gouge out "keyholes" in the sides of it here and there to get easy access to the entire surface.  Our potato bed has two keyholes on the south edge and one on the north.  It's now essentially a curving bed, like a very wide M.  Three more beds with keyholes followed, one similar to this one and two with less describable shapes in leftover sections of the garden.

Even with the fancy serpentine keyhole beds, I still felt the need to make the layout unnecessarily interesting.  My one indulgence was to have a small bed that contains only one tipi of pole bean poles.  I suspect a more efficient land use plan could have been devised in this region, but I convinced myself that the ability to walk all the way around the tower of scarlet runner beans was prerequisite to a successful harvest.  It had nothing to do with showcasing my great collection of sunflower stalks.

Now that the garden space has been defined, I see how much of it there is.  The transplants are all done and there is still plenty of vacancy.  It's getting too late for planting peas, lettuce (though I'm going to keep trying with the lettuce), and brassicas, but we have bush beans, beets, carrots, and parsnips galore that would be happy to move in.




Making bed feels like a too much work to do every spring, and this year it seems to have made me late in getting the sowing done.  I want to keep the same beds for next summer, so I will try not to wreck them during harvest time.  And I'll keep perusing the Lethbridge Shopper for straw bale mongers.