
August Gardening Tips
If you haven’t already, now could be a good time to fertilize lawns and gardens.
If you haven’t already, now could be a good time to fertilize lawns and gardens.
Raised bed gardens have become very popular with home gardeners because they can be made in any size or shape and placed almost anywhere. The idea is to plant a garden above the ground using a well-thought-out soil mixture, instead of tilling and amending the ground below. Raised garden beds offer the following benefits over in-ground gardens:
Although raised garden beds offer many benefits, they do have a few disadvantages such as:
You don’t need a lot of space to build a raised bed, but you must find a spot that receives full sun most of the day, or at the very least six hours. There are many raised bed designs available, and the bed sizes and shapes vary widely. There are a few guidelines that should be followed when constructing a raised garden:
One of the most important steps when of building a raised bed is constructing a good healthy soil. Healthy soil contains a complex soil food web that requires a healthy growing medium.
Raised Bed Soil:
The soil in the raised bed will create the environment that either promotes or hinders healthy plant growth. Despite its benefits, the particle size of potting soil is too dense to be used in raised garden beds. Soil can be engineered specifically for raised beds to give plants access to the air, water, and nutrients needed for growth. Healthy soil contains billions of microscopic organisms that all work together to break down organic matter and provide nutrients to plants. There is no need to feed plants with fertilizer, instead feed the soil and it will feed the plants.
Although raised bed soil is more expensive than lesser quality soils, it is best to invest in it as soil is one of the most important factors that determine the success of your garden. Using poor quality soil can have detrimental effects on root growth, which in turn leads to a shortage of produce. The ideal soil type to use in a raised bed is formulated using a combination of:
Highway Fuel’s Power Plant Mix has the ideal combination of Compost, Sandy Loam, and Pumice that makes it our recommendation for your raised bed gardening needs.
A customer said he had heard of the practice of shredding leaves prior to using them as mulch but wondered about the reason behind it. Was it just to make it easier to dispose of the leaves, since, once shredded, the load would be more compact? Or was there some other benefit?