Raised beds for vegetables

We'll be building new beds this weekend on some unused driveway space up in the mountains.

I know I'll be a happier gardener to be tending more vegetables and herbs, away from my main spaces, which will benefit from a break, especially the main vegetable garden, which needs to be fallow, to reduce root-knot nematodes.

But there are gardening activities here to be done, too. The major task is freeing many mulched beds from their cloak of (weedy) winter annuals. Uh, and my gardening companion has yet to get the lawn mower out; I'm not a lawn person, but what's out there is getting pretty sizeable. He's had other distractions, certainly, but hopefully he'll crank up the riding mower soon.

I'm afraid I've only mowed a lawn a couple of times in my gardening life, and that with a push gasoline-powered mower back in Statesboro, GA in our first house and garden, in the last summer there, after my gardening companion (AKA my husband Tim) had already relocated to Clemson, SC.

Comments

  1. Glad to hear you aren't a lawn mowing kind of gal..me either. The only time I mowed our lawn was when we lived in Germany and our landlord had a push mower...not the gas nor electric kind, a rotary push mower. I really liked it. I will have to say our yard was about the size of a single car garage. I think if you have a sharp blade and well oiled mower it SHOULDN'T be hard. Now we are moving to an acre and I have enough to tend to with the gardens. My husband will enjoy riding around on his riding lawnmower.
    Glad you got the raised beds done.

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  2. We have a little lawn, but the mower is excellent for chopping up the leaves~~tons of them~that fall each autumn. Good luck with the weedy winter annuals! gail

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  3. Yay for not mowing! I hear you about the root knot nematodes... so frustrating to leave fallow spots when you have limited space. I heard the other day that they can't survive on corn roots, but I'm not so sure.

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  4. Aargh, the root-knot nematodes are a real problem, so I'm resigned to leaving that space fallow for a season, if I have new garden beds...

    Janet and Gail,
    I wish we didn't have ANY lawn to mow, but what we have is still quite low-maintenance (at least the way we do it -- no fertilizer, no pre-emergent weed-killer, no aerating, etc. We just mow what's green (at least that's the idea).

    But this year, it's been a bit stretched out beyond that!

    Cheers,
    Lisa

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