What did my raised garden beds do last garden season?

The raised bed garden is our garden 2 on the garden plan.

The garden season 2023 started dry and hot, which was not very useful for gardening. As mentioned in a previous post the carrots did not want to sprout. We found only 5 carrots in our raised beds and the onions we harvested where ratter small.

Where the carrots did not sprout, we planted tomatoes and peppers. I had pre-cultivated way too many to grow only in the greenhouse. We improved the soil a little with some manure and sawdust before planting. With the hot and dry wetter and us not watering much the tomatoes and peppers obvious did not do well. The tomatoes where only small brown sticks standing in the ground, but in August the wetter changed. We got rain on a regular base and the tomato plants started growing a little from the roots again. We even where able to harvest a few tomatoes before the blight came.

My daughter did a better job. She had this beautiful healthy looking tomato plant with some bright green tomatoes. When the tomatoes where ripe, she was quicker with harvesting then I was with taking a picture, but the taste was wonderful. The kid’s generally are very serious about there own gardens and love to water, so the tomato plants in there gardens obviously did better.

In the growing season 2022 I had left some leeks in the ground and they flowered beautifully. The only thing is that I missed out on the right point to harvest the seed. When the wetter changed and we had more rain some of the seed started to sprout right where it was. The seed head of the leeks looked very interesting, as if it has hair. I still was able to save some seed from the seed head, because not all seed had sprouted. We will use some of it in the coming growing season.

What I am definitely not liking is using straw as mulch in the garden. There are still so many seeds in there, which sprout, that I always have so much grain growing in the gardens. In this raised bed the leeks are partially hidden from all of the grain growing there.

I took out all of the grain (and also a lot of couch grass) to give the leeks some space.

Last fall we made a lot of biomass on a hay field. With this stuff the seed had long fallen out before we mowed it, so that should be much more to my liking as the straw. This biomass will serve as mulch for the gardens in the coming growing season, so we will see if the seed really has all fallen out before we pressed it to bales. Or maybe we will have gardens filled with plants from the hay field.

After the wetter turned in August we did some new sowing. We sowed dill, different varieties of lettuce and some sugar peas, which sprouted well and we even could harvest from, before the first frost came. I was positively surprised about that with the late sowing in August, but we had a long and mild fall, so sowing this late in the season will probably not work every year.

In one garden bed I planted a few potatoes, but we have a big problem with the couch grass coming trough every where. The roots of the grass actually just grow right trough the potatoes and I could put a big part of the harvest into the compost. Such a shame.

We also planted some flowers, but we should do a lot more to attract predator insects.

Last but not least our garden 2 also has a normal garden patch which was rotary tilled last spring (because of the couch grass). We planted red and white cabbages there, with celeriac in between. We planted a lot, counting in losses to pests, for instance, the caterpillar of the white cabbage butterfly. As you can see on the picture here we also used straw as mulch and the entire patch was full with grain already turning brown since I took the picture in the fall.

As expected some cabbage plants did better then others and there where more then enough pests. All in all this patch did alright. A part of the cabbages formed nice big heads.

There where a lot of pests like this caterpillar (probably the cabbage moth, Plutella Xylostella) and this maggot (probably a small cabbage fly, Delia Radicum).

I could harvest more then enough cabbage heads to make enough sauerkraut to last us until the next harvest. I bought this slicer especially for making sauerkraut and I must say that the sauerkraut becomes much better as to when I cut it with a knife. Obviously with a knife I can not cut the cabbage as thinly as with the slicer and when I am making this kind of bigger batches I will always use the slicer from now on.

Unlike the cabbages the celeriac did not do to well. Most of the plants did survive the dry and hot spring and summer start, but they stayed small and did not make any tuber. As I understand celeriac needs a lot of water to make a tuber, so I think this is not really the right crop for us to grow.

Luckily I had a celery variety for the stalks for the first time this year, which thrived very well in the greenhouse. We liked this celery for our soups very much, so we did not have to go without. We will grow this variety on a bigger scale this year.

After harvesting was done we let the chickens into the garden to help on pest reduction.

Concluding I have to say that the garden soil is slowly improving, but it still has a long way to go. Having a drought spell is terrible, because the soil dries out so quickly and becomes so hard (like concrete) that if we water, the water just flows of to the side and waters the walking paths in stead of the garden soil.

The couch grass also is a big problem. It is all over in the original ground and on the walking paths. We can not dig it all out, that is just too much and we would have to empty out all of the raised beds again and dig out all of the fruit trees in order to do so.

Well, we are going to have to think of a new approach for these raised beds for the new garden season. We are having some thoughts there, but that is for a different time.