How To Grow Simple…
Our Raised Row Beds At The Old World Garden Farm
Have you always wanted to grow your own food? If you are one of those that think gardening has to be back breaking work – think again! Below is our four-part series on how to plant a simple garden using raised row beds.
Our raised row, no till and low maintenance beds provide us with thousands of pounds of vegetables each year, and keep us in fresh and canned food year round. Through each of the four parts – we take you through the process of how we plan, plant, care and maintain our raised row garden beds – and how to create your own simple garden in your yard.
OUR FOUR PART SERIES – GROWING SIMPLE:
Just click on the steps below to view each of the four part series.
1. Growing Simple With Raised Rows, No-Till Beds
2. Preparing And Planting The Garden
3. Maintaining The Garden Through The Season
4. Keeping Your Beds Productive
The attached pictures are all from our garden the last two years. It measures only 40 x 60′ and in general, we spend less than 10 minutes a day working in it through the spring and summer months.
So maybe we planted a few too many peppers in the garden plan this year!
Make sure to rotate your plants and grow them in different spaces each year
Zucchini
Fresh Carrots
Our tomato staple..the Roma.
potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, lettuce peas and green beans
Sugar snap peas
Hot Pepper Crop
Our Compost Bins – made from pallets
How do you keep the animals (rabbits, deer and squirrels) out of your garden? My husband is wanting to plow up a larger area for me but he is worried about the critters eating everything that we plant. We have a smaller one by the house but our dogs keep everything away but Im wanting to expand.
Kristy,
We are very fortunate and have not had a lot of problems with animals thus far. I am a little worried about the coming year though, as the deer have seemed to locate our garden and winter rye over the past few months! We are going to fence in the main area in the coming year to help too. Thanks so much for stopping by! Jim
Kristy, I learned many years ago that if you spread dog poo around the perimeter of your garden, the animals think there is a predator there and won’t bother the plants. I know it sounds a little gross but fertilizer is just broken down, composted cow, chicken, horse, etc. leavings. There were cows that grazed around my garden and I watched them back away from the plants when I did it. Luckily I had a couple of big dogs.
We live in an area with many, many deer, so we merely built a high fence to keep them out. We used treated fence posts with 2×3 extensions, and 48″ wide stucco wire arranged so that we have an 8′ tall fence all around. We’ve never had any critter problems as a result, and the fence was quite inexpensive.
I’m going to give it a go at building the compost bins you have above, I do live in a condo with a fairly small backyard…so I will downsize the project to fit my yard. Do you have front slats to cover the front of the bins, or do u leave them open? I was thinking of enclosing mine completely but leaving the top open of course. What do you think? Im new at this HELP lol
Hi Nicole – I think it’s great that you are going to try it! You can certainly enclose it in and leave the top open – or you can even put a few slats over the top to enclose it all. I would just make sure you have one of the sides made so that you can easily take it off when it comes time to get it out. Good luck and if we can be of any help don’t hesitate to ask! Jim
I think your ‘cucumbers’ are actually zucchini. Love the information, though. Hoping to try something different with gardening this year.
Ha! You are so right Kevin! Thank you – I will have to correct that title of the picture! Jim
We have 220sq. feet of veg. garden (began as flower beds 8 yrs ago when we moved in) I’m happy to say that we’re down to one bed of “flowers” that are edible/medicinal and still beautiful. We have an acre of ground and we’re wanting to expand our garden. I was wanting to put in several 4×8 raised beds but after seeing your awesome pics….i think we’ll save the additional cost and do raised rows. Thanks for the inspiration. Also, we’ve collected pallets all winter and i’m so very glad i read your trick to disassemble them before we got into that big job. I think you’ve created another blog-stalker!
Hi Michelle! We are glad you found us and glad you like the site! I think you will really like the raised row approach and you will have to let us know how it works out for you! Jim
Hi! I’m enjoying your blog very much!
But I do have a question about your raised row method. In the past I’ve tried raising potatoes under straw, and I use it also for mulch. It works very well, but I’ve had some problems with mice. In fact, the mice got more of my potatoes than I did!
Have you had similar problems? How do you deal with the little buggers? I’ve thought of putting bait trays out, using commercial rat and mouse poison, but I’m leery of too much of that stuff in my garden.
Thanks! And keep up the fine blog! I’ve recommended it to all my friends!
Hi Howard – so glad you enjoy the blog! Wow – that does sound like a problem with the mice. We have never had that problem – knock on wood. We grow ours in the ground with just a light covering of straw on top – is that how you have been growing them? Jim
Hi! Yes, They grew very well that way, but the mice loved them! The gophers get after them too, but the mice are the worst. I’m going to try a gopher repellent this year, and see if that will keep them out. And I do intend to try your raised row method for most of my garden, and maybe even sell my tiller.
Hello. A friend of mine raises veges on a larger scale and sells them to a local veggie auction. They use metal lengths of pipe and put mouse bait inside. They put several of these home-made stations thruout their garden making sure that the bait goes to the center of the pipe. Or you can crimp the one end and send the bait to that end by tilting the pipe after baiting. That way dogs, cats etc cannot get into the bait.
You will have to let us know how the garden grows for you this year! Good luck and hopefully you can keep the gophers and mice out of the potatoes! Jim
We live in South Australia and have terrible problems with possums eating our veggies. It has put a complete stop to us this year until we can come up with a solution.
Years ago we lived on 85 acres surrounded by forest. Blood meal worked for keeping the critters out of the garden (laid thickly around the whole perimeter of the garden). At the time, we could get blood meal from the co-op, these days you might have to do a google search.
Please sign me up for more ideas, thanks for the great tips.
Thanks for these 4 posts. I’m excited to incorporate some of these ideas in a few weeks.