Raised Bed Gardening Maintenance

Entrance to the raised bed vegetable garden.

Raised bed gardening maintenance took precedence this past weekend.  We had one glorious day of 50-degree warmth, and we took advantage of it to do some much needed raised bed gardening maintenance.  While my flower garden is planted directly into the hillside next to the driveway, the vegetable garden consists of 12 raised beds.  Ten of the beds are 4 feet x 10 feet, and two beds are 10 x 8 feet.  Each is filled with 100% compost we had trucked in; it's the by product of the local paper mills.  We fenced the whole garden area off and put an underground water line from the house spigot down to the garden area for emergency irrigation.

So what kind of chores do you do with raised bed gardening maintenance?  You refill the beds.  I'm not sure whether it's the composition of the soil itself - nearly 100% organic compost - or just the action of hungry plants breaking it down for food, but each bed was down to about half of its soil level since we build the raised bed garden in 2008.  We moved about a dozen wheelbarrows of compost from the pile where the truck driver left it on the lawn before we were too tired to move anymore. It's a surprisingly long distance, and although downhill from the compost pile - you still have to walk up hill to return to the pile and start again!

The next maintenance chore was to repair the wooden sides of the bed.  Several of the longer pieces of wood split where we had nailed or drilled screws in to hold the pieces together.  Several of the boards split, and require a few nails to hold them together.

We got about halfway done before the cold weather and rains returned.  I'm glad we could get a jump on spring, even if it was just for a few hours on a rare warm winter day!