Synthetic grass/turf around my vegetable garden

Upkeeping my deck (front and back) drives me crazy - tiles does sound appealing alright!

Thanks Kasalia, I just finished laying the rubber mats down this afternoon.

Naturally, I couldn't possibly lay the mats down without having to customise most of them by cutting to size/shape with a sharp Stanley knife and this took a considerable amount of time to do but I'm very happy with the end result.

A point to note was how fast the Stanley box cutter blades went blunt slicing through the rubber instead of replacing the blades I just kept sharpening them on my old hand grinder it worked a treat!

These rubber pavers really seat together easily - even on slightly undulating ground which is good because this particular area was not completely level and even the smaller patch work in areas worked nicely due to the weight of them they tend to stay put once in place.

I'll clean up the off-cuts and rubbish then take a pic tomorrow and post it here.

 

It's done!

Well, technically it's not fully finished because I've decided to cut key holes into my old big square sleeper beds in order to make accessing the centre of the beds easier so I have left a gap in the paving for just that - see in the pic below.


The rest of the rubber paving looks great - so much better underfoot than gravel too!

 

It doesn't always look orderly but I'm keen this year to try and keep the patch in better shape than in the past. I really want to "cash in" this winter and be prepared so I'm doing a heap of work in this off season to get the beds up to scratch and fix issues that have been bugging me for years once and for all! I said to my wife yesterday, "this is the year of doing everything I've been putting off," and I mean it!

 

You've still got it alright Steve

 

Lots of good questions guys and after a decade of experiments I've learned many lessons about vegetable gardening and fruit tree growing.

I did start out growing most of my crops in furrows and this took a great amount of digging by hand. Than I upgraded to using a beast of a tiller to work the ground over each season like a mini farm but honestly I haven't dragged that machine out for ages.

Raised beds are where I have evolved to now days and the main reason for this is because it's easier and if you are doing a lot of work on your property like me then savings in physical energy and time becomes valuable indeed.

And, the higher raised beds (around 70 - 85 cms) are my favorite. After a day in the garden, my back and knees really appreciate stand up gardening it makes a huge difference especially as you get older or suffer from injury/disability.

I still have a mix of lower raised beds and higher raised beds with a small "wild" area at the back of my patch for odd plants not suited to raised beds such as rosella plants as they get too big.

However, if I started over from scratch I would buy or build all high raised beds, actually I probably wouldn't even bother using wood sleepers I would simply use galvanised or colorbond raised beds - they last longer and are easier to build.

I'd get several different shapes because round, rectangle, oval, or hexagonal can be useful for different crops but they'd all be 70-85 cm high - except for my "wild" area where I'd either keep in ground or small raised beds no higher than 40 cm to grow higher plants like corn or rosella (as I mentioned earlier).

Tomatoes come to mind also as a tall crop requiring a small sided raised garden bed, although, I'm working on ways to grow them in high beds and I've had recent success tumbling indeterminate tomatoes down over high round beds (no stakes)

Crops that historically have been grown up like beans or peas for example can be trained to tumble down or climb over an archway in between two raised beds. I'm trying all these things and I reckon it'll work but if it doesn't I'll always keep a few raised beds with smaller sides for these types of plants.

There's other good reasons for high raised vegetable garden beds besides being easier to dig, weed, harvest, or irrigate, such as: less pests/animals, better soil development over time, easier crop organisation, and they look good.

I'm currently writing an article about raised beds covering the points above in more depth and I'm also chatting on Sunshine Coast radio this Monday about this very subject so hopefully I can post a podcast of our conversation here and a link to the article when it's done.

The other major thing I would change if starting from scratch is to ensure the access areas and pathways around my vegetable garden beds were well drained particularly in a high rainfall climate because these areas quickly turn to mud in a well used veggie patch during bad weather. I've fixed this problem now but I did take the long road in doing so.

Also, I wished I had built my initial raised beds so I could reach the centre from the side without getting into the bed. Walking into the garden bed to dig, weed, harvest etc is not only inconvenient or difficult when the bed is full of plants but it also compacts the soil which isn't good for food crops.

I make sure the centre of all beds I build now can be reached without getting into it.

Our patch is about 16 x 40 mtrs. Our composting area is at the back of our vegetable garden it's handy to have it close by and it should be big enough to hold several heaps of compost on the go, a pile of ready made compost, plus the odd dump of manure maturing before being ready to use. Of course, your composting area is relative in size to your garden so for ours we have 3 large bays.

One thing I did get right from the beginning was the positioning of our vegetable garden. Full sun most of the day and away from large trees shade and roots.

Food gardening is high energy stuff and full sun is very important when it comes to growing productive and healthy plants.

Having the patch positioned central in the backyard overall is handy for access and it's practical. Some people want a vegetable garden but don't want it to be seen - this can be a mistake... we use our patch as a showcase so we deliberately framed it right in the middle of our back lawn.

This also had an unintended advantage in regards to damage from animals like possums. Due to the several metres of grass between our patch and the nearest tree there's much less crop damage.

In the beginning, I did place a few beds closer to the trees and unless I netted them the crops would get smashed but since moving all the beds to the central location I hardly ever see any crop damage from animals.

I'll have a break from typing on my phone and write some more in another post soon including orchard or fruit tree sighting and what worked for us.

 

Sounds great - you can grow plenty in that space.

You will get 10 years out of sleepers so it's a good material for raised garden beds although I do think the galvanised or colorbond beds are longer lasting and easier to assemble to be honest. Hardwood beds do look good to though...

I like having different sizes and shapes of raised beds because I can grow all these mini crops completely separate to each other. I can grow jalapenos in a bed and fully cover the crop from fruit fly and in the next bed I can grow lettuce without a cover. I can rest a bed or several over a season without much impact on production.

There's heaps of different materials or combinations of raised beds to suit whatever property or situation. If need be you can grow pumpkins up a trellis instead of letting it roam all over the yard but if it's a big variety you'll have to sling the fruit to provide support for it that's all.

Yes it does work, so if you only had a certain amount of lower sided raised beds and say these were being rested from a certain crop (like beans) then you could use a higher raised bed in the meantime and let the plants grow up a small structure and then let them tumble back down again right down the sides to the ground if you wanted.

You can grow spuds in any sized bed (even a bucket) and potatoes have a pretty versatile growing medium from straw through to slightly heavy soil as long as they are not over watered or over fertilised and your seed is disease free from the beginning potatoes are one of the easiest crops to grow.

Crushed granite works well and I still do recommend it.

However, in the last 4 raised beds (high sides 70 - 85 cms) I used organic matter found on our property to fill the bottom half - things like logs, sticks, leaves, weeds, etc and the reason I did this was because it not only saved costs it will provide a living base of microorganisms, fungi, worms, that will break down this organic matter and add value to the bed over time.

The top half I filled with premium garden soil (purchased in bulk) and then mulched. Don't be too concerned about drainage in these large raised beds - even if the whole bed was soil it wouldn't really matter to be honest because the base is open. Yes, technically if one was worried about a bed becoming water logged then go with some granite or sand in the base but really what I have learnt from my beds over the past several years shows little difference if it has proper drainage medium in the base or not. I now think organic matter is a better option for the lower half.

Yeah, do that... You might find like me that possums aren't a problem and sometimes you just need to cover the plants until they are past seedling and the possums leave them alone after that. Plus, not all plants need covering - well, that's my experience anyway. My biggest problem is fruit fly so I need to cover vulnerable plants with a fine insect net and prefer to do this as required bed by bed rather than try to make the whole area fruit fly proof.

I have considered it and although I find hydroponics interesting it's not for me. I find hydroponically grown crops don't taste as good as in soil. Plants pull more than just food from the soil and that's why grapes from different vineyards taste slightly different - I think vegetables grown in your own soil mix take on a bit of your own individual property but that's just my opinion and I suppose I have good success growing vegetables in soil so can't be bothered changing

There's logic in that... as long as the centre can be reached from the side of the bed it's personal preference really. As I said before, I like a mix because just as the big raised beds are great from my asparagus and ginger crop a small round bed is good for herbs or one of my stand alone "experiments."

I don't necessarily crop rotate every year. Sometimes I'll grow the same annual crop in the same bed for several years in a row and there are plants such as self-seeding coriander that spring up in the same place every year and have done for the past decade. Crop rotation is a good concept but I've never followed it; however, if a certain bed has a pest build-up affecting a certain crop I will give it a rest for a few seasons and try something else - it's not something I plan each year though.

I'll write some more tomorrow!

 

I remember seeing a clip on Gardening Australia or some TV show where they showcased an Italian family backyard vegetable garden it was beautiful and every square inch was devoted to food crops.

Anyway, in that episode they talked about how "Nona" grows her Roma tomatoes in the same spot every year and has done for decades by squashing a few unharvested tomatoes into the ground after each season to let them self sow for the next. No crop rotation there but it obviously works for her

What a good plan! That'd look nice too.

Perfect! Use any organic matter waste for the base. We had a caller on the radio show yesterday ask if she could use palm fronds for the base of raised beds as fill and I thought that was a good idea also. Yes, it might take years to break down but it will eventually.

In regards to topping the beds up with compost, you will find this is necessary nearly every season because dirt compacts over time or the organic base matter breaks down and the bed sinks a little, or harvesting, weeding etc removes dirt. This is a positive thing because it's good to add new compost or mulch each season anyway to top the beds and keep the nutrients up.