Our Raised Bed Garden

Gardening is a huge part of our lives in the spring and summer months, we are almost always out in the yard working in flower beds or raised beds. Watering in the early morning with the sun just beginning to poke above the hill in the pasture behind the yard, fertilizing, pulling weeds, training little plants to climb arbors or attaching them to trellises. It's hard work but it's rewarding. 

We started using raised beds for the last 6+ years (dang, has it been that long?) with cattle panel arbors. We decided to try it after we saw our dear friend Jacque over at Deep Roots At Home beautiful garden. Did you catch our original post on building raised beds and making your own garden soil? If not find it HERE. These boxes have held up so well! This was the first year we had to replace any of them, but we had to move them anyway so it all worked out. Where we had them before just got too shady so we decided to build the new ones at the bottom of the backyard where our original garden was. Curious what the yard looked like when we first moved here? Check it out HERE. 

We actually added a few more beds to our line up this year (technically it wasn't on purpose, but hey it worked out fine). Mr. Cottage decided to leave one side of the raised open aka without an arbor so it would be a little easier to access plants. I love how they kind of look like the cover to wagons.

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We decided to try something new with our tomato plants, the cages we normally use always end up being too small and falling over (even when we stake them up). So this year we cut 2x4s and attached them to both ends of our raised beds with screws, then wrapped galvanized steel fence wire (17 gauge)  around them in several places. We'll be using velcro garden ties to attach/support it against the wire.

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Funny story when we were looking for a wire to wrap around the poles we stopped by Tractor Supply. Mr. Cottage couldn't find what he was looking for so he decided to ask the young man that was unfortunate enough to be the closest to our mayhem while I quietly finished my cookie dough blizzard. "What?" was the guy's startled response. "Bailing wire," Mr. Cottage repeated patiently, "OHHHH! I thought you said bathing wire!"

We'll end up adding another row of wire lower to the ground to keep them supported and growing upright. We also removed the lower limbs on the tomatoes to help prevent the plant getting diseased when water splashes up on their leaves.

When we were laying out our garden we decided we wanted the aisles wide enough to get a mower through, we usually push mow through it to prevent the spread of weed seeds into the raised beds but it's nice to be able to get wide things like the mower & trailer through.

We planted a row of tomatoes down the center of each box, marigolds on the outside, beans on the inside by the arbor, and rows of seed tape between that will hopefully begin putting in an appearance soon (tutorial coming soon).

Each bed holds two 16 foot cattle panels, we bent them between two raised beds and stapled them to the sides to help hold them in place during storms.

These arbors work perfectly for green beans, cucumbers, and gourds. This year we have nest egg gourds and Roma beans growing on them, we'll add luffa gourds soon. 

On the other end of the garden, we moved our plastic raised beds that Grandma Cottage bought. 

Down here we have squash, zucchini, cantaloupe, lettuce, peppers, eggplant, and herbs. We sprinkled marigolds throughout to help repel bugs like Grandma Cottage use to do.

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Our first batch of lettuce is ready to cut! I love the way it looks. We planted the kind of close so together to get that solid row look.