How to refresh your raised vegie garden beds | Garden Design and Inspiration | Gardening Australia

Jerry rejuvenates a raised vegetable bed, returning it to a functional and productive patch. Subscribe 🔔 http://ab.co/GA-subscribe
Many gardens around the country have a raised vegie bed. Typically made of metal, plastic or wood with a depth of around 50cms, they’re popular for three good reasons. Firstly, their height provides easy access for people of all abilities and those of us that don't like bending all day long in the garden. If you have no soil or unsuitable soil, it's easy to fill these with premium planting mix, and best of all, once there in production they can look beautiful.

Jerry’s revitalising a 12-year-old raised bed which is strategically located to capture 8 hours of sun. It has excellent ventilation and is positioned on the highest part of the site, so it has perfect drainage. Despite these good traits, raised beds are not a ‘set-and-forget'. They're often filled with a high portion of organic matter like composts and manures to improve soil and help vegetables grow. Over time, soil levels can slump as the organic matter decomposes, which can create a hard environment for plants to grow in.

Here's Jerry’s tips to freshen up a tired raised vegetable bed and return it to its productive glory.

Remove past crops:
This bed has some remaining lettuce, capsicum and basil which is still good to eat. There’s also lots of basil seeds to harvest and plant elsewhere. Bin any diseased material and compost the rest.

Raise the soil level:
Jerry mixes in 100 litres of compost and 100 litres of soil to replenish the slumped soil in this 1.5m diameter bed. You don’t need to fill it all the way up, leave about 15cm from the rim. This premium compost contains cow and chicken manure, fish and seaweed, and blood and bone which will provide nutrients to the plants while building humus in the soil as it breaks down.

Test the pH:
Sometimes, purchased soils, manures and composts can be highly alkaline so it can be useful to have a soil pH test kit at hand. Take a very small amount of soil or compost for the test. The ideal pH range for vegetables, herbs and spices is pH 6.5 to pH 7. Jerry’s compost chemistry is not ideal, but by mixing all the components together and leaving them for three weeks, it should achieve an acceptable balance.

Plant new crops:
Crop rotation is an important way of managing pests and diseases. The previous occupants were capsicums from the Solanaceae family, and basil from the Lamiaceae family, so this time Jerry is avoiding planting crops from either of those families.

Jerry broadcasts subtropical carrot ‘kuroda’ seeds mixed with sand to make it easier to sow, then layers sugar cane mulch in a thin veneer to keep soil cool and allow young seedlings to burst through. Jerry finds it easier to plant seedlings through the mulch, rather than adding mulch around the seedlings. The seedlings include butterhead lettuce, triple curl parsley and spring onions, and as these grow, you can thin out the baby carrots and enjoy them as your first crop.

Raised beds often suffer in hot weather. They can become heatsinks and cook the contents, particularly if they are coated with dark or metallic materials. Planting cucumbers takes advantage of the available space around the edges where they can spill out over the sides and provide passive cooling.

Add life to soil:
Even a small bed can have biologically active soil. Jerry has collected soldier fly larvae, Surinam cockroaches and red wriggler worms from his compost and pours them in to improve the ecology of this very small ecosystem. Here they can carry on doing their good work, adding life to soil.

Job done! If you've got a neglected raised bed, now’s the time to rejuvenate it and get it back into production.
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Видео How to refresh your raised vegie garden beds | Garden Design and Inspiration | Gardening Australia канала Gardening Australia