Making Your Garden Grow

After yet another failed attempt to grow anything I want instead of allowing the weeds and handful of unidentifiable flowers grow, I began noticing that some of my neighbors were doing quite well. Lots of brightly colored flowers, some great tomatoes, etc. And then I realized all of the best-looking gardens were in raised beds, rather than right in the ground.

And so that’s what I’ll be doing next spring, keeping “Cubed Foot Gardening: Growing Vegetables in Raised, Intensive Beds” close at hand.

Author Christopher O. Bird writes about the basics—how to get started, what’s wrong with trying to garden the old-fashioned, right-in-the-ground way and what to expect.

He offers three arguments for raised beds: They can be drained better, they provide warmer soil and the gardener has total control of what’s in the soil. And intensive means, just plant, with appropriate spacing, but forget rows. You don’t have to walk between the plants; why line them up? And because you’re providing good soil, that allows you to use more plants because the good soil provides more than average nutrients.

He writes with a little bite—when discussing okra, for example, he says this: “Northerners mostly don’t know how to eat okra…pickled okra feels and smells like something you might dissect in biology class.” Or, on getting rid of a borer insect: “Place him (the bug) on the ground and position the sole of your shoe on top of him, applying moderate pressure.”

There are a number of little remarks like that that I found entertaining. So he’s not writing mushy little heartwarming pieces of advice. He’s providing practical experience and commentary based on years of gardening in a variety of climates. (He was in the Air Force and moved around a lot.)

He’s also not caught up in organic matters too much; in fact, those who are organic gardeners may have a dispute or two with a few of his views, which have nothing to do with his core case for raised gardening beds. It’s not that he’s anti-organic; he just argues that sometimes the fears about products aren’t backed up by evidence.

Since, as he notes, trying to grow vegetables and other plants in hardpacked, poor-quality soil (the very definition of what I have in my yard (the verticulum wilt that is killing my plum tree aside), is a bit of a fool’s errand, he has alternatives to offer.

He gives us the basics of growing, including:
An explanation of varieties that start with seeds vs. transplants, growing in the sun instead of the shade, proper watering techniques and an explanation of the kinds of soil most of will encounter.

He moves on to explaining how to build and set up a bed, what kinds of wood to use, and how to plan the garden, meaning selecting what you want to grow, determining its proper growing season and moving from spring to summer to fall growing seasons.

He writes extensively about growing specific vegetables and fruits: corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant, broccoli, peppers, melons, potatoes, squash—they’re all here, along with advice on eating them and a recipe for pickling.

There’s also a frost chart by region, listing the first and last days recommended to avoid frost; a list of bugs and their favorite foods; alternatives, such as container gardening; some advice on gardening in extreme weather, such as south Texas, which he dubs “Hell,” and a list of the errors he sees gardeners make most often.